Yeah that really is a terrible decision. I have had two Bolts and they are wonderful cars, but I would not buy again if I couldn't use the phone integration.
I don't really care how great their new stereo head is, cars last a long time and there's 0% chance they'll keep up with the phone over the long term.
Lower end cars, until recently, have long had a rich enough aftermarket to support basically any interior comfort you'd want. I've got Carplay, wireless charging, and blind spot sensors, all in my entry model BMW that was never made to even support any of these features.
Now I'm right there with you on the mechanicals and exteriors.
I've done this to lots of old cars too, but I'd never claim it to be as good as an interior built for carplay - typically the sight lines to the display are compromised if doing something like a double-DIN carplay head unit from Sony et al etc. I've generally had no issues finding adapters that allow legacy steering wheel controls to control the aftermarket head unit/carplay too.
However, the display often ends up too low on the dash in older vehicles with a retrofit, modern cars typically place it higher on the dash almost level with the instrument cluster to make it easier to check for navigation etc, most modern cars can even sync carplay directions to a secondary display in the instrument cluster. The siri mic solution can be compromised too, depending on the vehicle and how you fit the mic. It's livable of course, but often not optimal.
Honestly, I would have said the same thing, but I switched to a Model 3 and don't miss CarPlay. What I really want is Spotify/Apple Music integration, and connected navigation that doesn't suck. Not disagreeing with you at all, but assuming GM could provide that, what would you miss?
> but I switched to a Model 3 and don't miss CarPlay
I have CarPlay on my Subaru and use the Model 3 in the Bay Area. (Borrowed car [a].) Tesla's UX is unrivaled. But it still can't match Apple's seamlessness. Shitty as Siri is, it can dial my next conference call, pull up the place I was just searching for on my Mac and respond to texts, consistently and hands free.
[a] Funny enough, I had suggested a Bolt to the owner. They got uncomfortable with the thought of buying a discontinued model, and so gave Tesla their money.
CarPlay does a lot: GPS, messages integration, audio (of _any_ kind), calls... honestly if car manufacturers start pulling support I'd love to see Apple introduce a "CarPlay UI on your phone" mode and I can just buy a phone mount and an audio cable.
A car manufacturer integration fails on two counts:
1) I don't trust them to make good software. I dread to think what permissions I'd have to grant the GM app in order for it to read and write text messages but I'd fear data leaks, voice transcription errors, etc etc. and I don't want to have to choose a music/podcast service based on what they do and do not support.
2) They'd make you pay extra. You know they would. Maybe not to start but they'd introduce monthly fees for it all once they've got you locked in.
3) They would stop updating your infotainment system after a few years and you'd either be stuck running old versions of everything or buying a new car. I want my car to last longer than the average Android phone.
Edit: Tesla might be the exception here, but do you imagine GM is going to be shipping OS updates for a 10 year old car? I think not.
> 2) They'd make you pay extra. You know they would. Maybe not to start but they'd introduce monthly fees for it all once they've got you locked in.
They have to, because in order to drive these features natively in your infotainment system they need active LTE/5G service.
Which is a total waste for the consumer, who likely already pays for such service for their smartphone, which has built in software designed to provide all these features to your infotainment system.
I'm an android user, so I have no experience with carplay, but personally I'd actually prefer a good standalone internet stereo and navigation system for my car over android auto. I don't really want my car to connect to my phone or stream the display over some weird proprietary protocol.
If automakers just can't get their act together to make a proper internet stereo/navigation system, they should develop an open standard allowing third parties to provide it instead. Not halfheartedly farm it out to the tech giants.
In this case Tesla has been outstanding in terms of software support. Our 2014 S is still getting updates even though it is now "legacy" according to Tesla. That's nearly 10 years of software support!
We did upgrade the central computer a few years ago to get 4g support, but $1500 felt very cheap for a whole new center screen, a new higher resolution instrument cluster, and a new computer making the whole car run faster.
If you hadn't upgraded the computer, would you still be getting software updates? If so, would the new software even run well?
The beauty of CarPlay and Android Auto is that it turns your infotainment system into a dumb terminal for your smartphone. As long as it can decode the video and audio streams, there is no reason it will not continue to get new features indefinitely via phone upgrades and new versions of iOS or Android.
Our phones are perfectly capable of doing all the things these car companies want us to pay extra for.
It's not that carplay is the only good way to build an infotainment system today, it's that carplay is the only good way to build an infotainment system today that will still be good 10 years later.
GM will provide all of that to you for $30 a month.
CarPlay gives it to you for free, using the data plan you already pay for on your phone to fetch maps and stream music.
My car does not need it's own internet connection to do these things, my phone can do them just fine. And as CarPlay and Android Auto have shown, it is borderline trivial to turn the giant touchscreen in my car into a dumb terminal for my smartphone.
It's one thing to charge me a subscription for something I use regularly, it's another entirely to make me pay a subscription for something I already get somewhere else, just so I can have it in my car.
GM can do what they want, that decision already drove us to purchase a car from a different manufacturer. Turns out that Hyundai makes a better car than GM anyway, IMO, so dumb corporate decisions turn in our favor.
So unfortunate it behaves like an inefficient gas car 24/7 when it's below freezing out.
It was one of only 2 vehicles in it's class (EV with a range extender), which was what I wanted, but being Canadian I wouldn't get the benefits half the year.
The other was the BMW i3 REx, I nearly bought one until I found out AC problems can somehow cost 5 figures to repair, effectively totalling the car.
"In April, GM said it would end production of the Bolt, flipping the Michigan plant where it is made to produce electrified versions of two trucks, the GMC Sierra and Chevrolet Silverado. The car, which comes as a hatchback and slightly larger crossover, uses an older battery platform than Ultium, GM’s new battery system.
...
Yet production of cars and trucks powered by Ultium batteries have been hampered by delays at a supplier that have limited GM’s capacity to build battery modules."
I've heard a lot of really good things about the Bolt EUV (the SUV-ish version). I assume they're fairly similar. I don't think it was so much then price as it was generally seen as a good EV in general.
It's still a three-and-a-half-ton behemoth (3,563 lbs, specifically)
Love ours too, especially now that we've finally had the battery replaced as part of that recall. The supply of batteries to the dealerships was ridiculously slow. Both they and we got tired of asking for when they'd be able to do the recall for our car.
NA needs more compact EVs. Smart Car sized (but not a Smart Car :D). I hate how many land-yachts I see in my local grocery store parking lot. You don't need an Escalade or a F150 to go to the mall.
I can't imagine the legroom in a smart cart with a rear facing car seat behind me. I also can't imagine bringing home groceries for our family in a car that small. Who said anything about buying and driving cars solely based on NEED?
The BMW i4 and Model 3 are compact EVs. They aren't sub-compact EVs, however, which is what we need more of (Chevy Bolt, BMW i3, are the only ones I know of in that category ATM).
As someone who used to own a Model 3, agreed. That is a good size for 99% of people. I wish they'd make a stationwagon concept on the same platform since the only reason I upgraded to the Y was because the trunk format is _just_ not good enough enough times that it becomes annoying. We tried to fit a Christmas tree and a filing cabinet etc and just couldn't...
I agree that the United States should rework the tax incentives that make large cars cheaper than they ought to be. That said...
Vehicle size is a classic prisoner's dilemma. In a two-car accident, the larger car is likely to fare better. So I totally understand why folks are buying crossover SUVs when they could just as easily fit in a car. Trying to guilt people into buying smaller cars than reason dictates is a losing strategy.
The only solution here is to stop subsidizing cheap oil and get rid of the weird emissions and tax loopholes that make trucks more attractive than they ought to be.
> In a two-car accident, the larger car is likely to fare better
If you've ever heard about the numerous SUV rollovers in the 90s - especially on poorly designed roads (see: reduced-turning-radius cloverleaf intersections) - you would realize that collisions with other vehicles are a mere fraction of the accidents you can have.
People buy big because they can afford it - guess what, economy sucks and the used market is crazy so there is incentive for new smaller cars.
Interesting - looks like the auto industry has really improved SUV safety for rollovers in the past 2 decades. I wonder how much is sway-bars and how much is simply lowering the height (ie, most crossovers are still SUVs).
Part of this may also align with the fact that SUVs are so varied a category that now there are 5+ size categories of SUV [1] as opposed to maybe two from the 90s - dilution of the brand in a marketable way.
I owned the bolt for 2 years before they bought it back from me - I still miss that car, it was the best car I’ve ever owned, so fun to drive. This news makes me really happy. I have a Ford Escape PHEV now and it’s been great and practical but nowhere near as fun to drive.
I had one as a rental and I thought it's great. Right size, enough power, maybe the handling could a little better/sportier. We need more smaller, utilitarian cars instead of the ever bigger cars that are being sold.
In 2017, the Bolt was one of my options. I couldn't wait for a Tesla M3 nor did I like the price, and was willing to settle for even a PHEV Prius (Volt only has 4 usable seats so was out of the running) but (with a lot of incentives) I pulled the trigger on a Ford Focus EV.
Bolt back then was $35k+ with incentives. Mine was less than $18k with incentives.
Range sucked on my FF (good enough to get me to work + back + leftover) but a) it cost half the Bolt b) had fast charging and c) I didn't have to go far to get one in stock.
I probably would have liked both of them - roomy enough to fit 5 + fast enough to enjoy the drive part. Ford discontinued the Focus, but honestly Bolt/Focus are decent EVs for a lot of people.
Mary Barra's ongoing tenure as GM Chair & CEO perplexes me.
Certainly the stock performance (-3.87% over 5Y vs -2.12% for Ford, wouldn't be fair to bring Tesla into the conversation) doesn't help to justify her position.
To wit: from January 2014, when Barra "took over as chief executive of General Motors" [1], to today, $10,000 invested in GM stock would have generated a total return (i.e. including dividends) of 26% (2.5% annualised) [2]. In the same time, the S&P 500 returned almost 150% [3].
In fact, an investor in January 2014 would only have to lock up their money for 5 months in Treasuries to generate the return Barra has delivered to her investors in ten years [4].
Then take the ten year yield, not the short term 5 months yield, you are comparing with the benefit of hindsight which is not viable for any financial analysis.
> take the ten year yield, not the short term 5 months yield
The ten-year yield was closer to 6% when Barra took the helm. That's much worse!
The point of the comparison is that the return she delivered over her ten-year term was analogous to that which an investor demanded to lend to the U.S. government for a grand total of five months. It's driving home the terribleness of the return within the context of her hiring: she has failed to return anything close to GM's cost of capital.
> you are comparing with the benefit of hindsight which is not viable for any financial analysis
Her entire statement doesn't make any sense. GM spends four years developing a vehicle iteration. Is she saying they are going to sell the old Bolt iteration, which was already old when canceled? I'm guessing they are just re-badging something else already in development.
They're bringing the bolt format to their new ultium platform, meaning it'll reduce the cost and complexity of building this vehicle.
It'll be like alongside the equinox and blazer, same platform for a smaller shell.
> So far this year customers had bought 2,300 Lyriqs and 49 Hummers, GM said.
Selling only 49 of a vehicle in a 6-month period seems... shockingly low. Can't even imagine what kind of bottlenecks they're running into with building them.
Voices from the outside always said Tesla was doomed when the large automakers started selling electric vehicles. That with their manufacturing know-how they would be selling millions within a couple years.
This is an embarrassingly low number of vehicles on the Ultium platform. It inspires zero confidence that GM will be good at managing their supply chain and manufacturing electric vehicles. GM's forecasts are borderline fraud at this point. They need to come forward with a realistic roadmap ending with significant production of electric vehicles.
Buying a new car in the USA that isn't NACS is osborning yourself. You are basically buying something that is significantly less value, just as if you bought a Beta VCR after it was clear that VHS would win.
Did I miss something in the announcement that said it wouldn't be NACS compatible? GM has already announced adapters and vehicles from 2025 will support it natively.
Not OP, but California Air Resource Board gives a significant rebate and I know if you live in the Central Valley you can get another rebate. That's 10k+ from the state alone up to 120k income for a family of 4. Our local utility also paid for a home charger($500) and $500 towards installing the charger. Our utility also put a second meter on our power for the charger that costs a reduced rate to charge with.
A little too late GM - if you kept small car manufacturing/Sales in Korea/EU and had not sold it off (Opel/GM Korea) then it might have worked - nobody wants this car in the US.
Good. The Bolt is a great form factor. We need to stop this never-ending race to get the biggest and heaviest cars for no reason in the US. We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used. The excess weight and size not only makes them harder to control but also much more dangerous when they collide with people or other cars and more damaging to our roads leading to more need for constant construction and bad effects on our climate due to the pollution created to maintain roads.
>Good. The Bolt is a great form factor. We need to stop this never-ending race to get the biggest and heaviest cars for no reason in the US.
This is basically a fringe position. According to wikipedia the Bolt is classed as a "subcompact" car. In the late 2010s basically every car manufacturer exited out of the subcompact segment[1] because of lackluster sales. At least in North America, almost nobody wants subcompact cars.
>We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used.
Every time this sort of conversation comes up, pickup trucks are always brought up as the problem. Yet, if you look at sales data[2], their market share only rose modestly. Arguably they're just returning to historical trends after fuel prices came back down in the late 2010s. The fastest growing segment is actually crossovers. They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks, but I suppose they're way harder to demonize so nobody really talks about them.
People try to sell this as a manufacturer decision, but they were really brought kicking and screaming into the current market. They all dumped huge amounts of money into developing updated small car platforms in the mid-2000s only to have them all wither on the vine. And companies that didn't offer SUVs or crossovers in their lineup got hammered.
> They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks
I disagree strongly with that. these are very different vehicles.
Crossovers are regulated like cars, built like cars, and anre often are roughly the same size as equivalent cars. They’re just lifted slightly off the ground (in some cases barely) and given a hatchback.
As an example, compare dimensions of a Toyota Camry to a Toyota RAV4. Most of the exterior dimensions are almost identical. The RAV4 is notably a little bit longer outside of the wheelbase and only about 200 pounds heavier.
I think the distinction people are grasping at here are monocoque constructed vehicles (the vast majority of cars/crossovers/SUVs on sale today) and ladder-frame/body on frame construction - most trucks and some really big SUVs/offroaders.
It's the body on frame vehicles that end up being heavy and compromised much of the time - its a way of manufacturing a vehicle that stretches back practically to the stone age. I also agree crossovers do not deserve to be compared to body-on-frame construction.
In interests of not upsetting anyone - I also agree there are some limited usecases body on frame is better! But for most private passenger transport, a monocoque construction will have advantages - size, weight, fuel economy (function of weight reduction), driving dynamics, pedestrian safety etc. Body on frame can also make it easier for a commercial vehicle to offer bed customization options, given the car structurally is just a pair of rails on wheels that can be extended or shortened as application demands. A monocoque generally can't change its length as easily.
There are new pickups flirting with monocoque construction - the Honda Ridgeline, Ford Maverick, Hyundai Santa Cruz, famously the Tesla Cybertruck...
The cybertruck will manage 14,000lbs on a monocoque. Just because traditionally this hasn't been the case doesn't mean you can't make a monocoque that can tow. The truck industry has had little incentive to innovate here until very recently as for 40 years vintage body-on-frame architectures have sold and sold. As I said - I'm not disagreeing that body on frame does have some legitimate use cases today - it's just that with modern construction techniques it's much more rarely going to be private transport.
Rated by who? Because I don't believe Tesla's claim because it seems absolutely outlandish. They would have been building F150's like this decades ago if it were true.
Has a car manufacturer ever lied about rated tow weights in recent memory? I genuinely don't see the incentive - it would just lead to crashes, warranty claims and eventually a class action lawsuit, or worse if deaths resulted. People rely on these numbers to drive safely.
14,000 lbs is absolutely within realms of normal/possible for a nearly 20 foot long 6000lb truck - its more or less exactly the same as high-spec Ford trucks.
It's almost a given one of the first things youtube is going do with a production Cybertruck is find something that weighs almost exactly 14000 lbs and try to tow it up and down the steepest inclines they can find.
Has Tesla ever promised something and not delivered, I think that's the real question. Another question is, how often are Teslas totaled for what would be a minor accident in another vehicle?
All that twisting and bending force being applied to a unibody, I can't see it ending well.
Tesla's Model X (depending on options) has a towing capacity of 5k lbs [1]. As far as I can tell, nobody is claiming that this is false and there's a few anecdotes of people with 5k campers they tow.
So, afaik, historical claims by Tesla on towing capacity are true so there seems to be more reason to believe a future towing claim is accurate based on previous towing claims than believe it's false because previous non-towing claims have been false.
I ran into one problem with monocoque/unibody construction. I ran my wife's Honda Pilot into another vehicle on icy roads. Around 5 mpg, direct T-Bone. We drove home about 75 miles just fine. No leaking fluids. About 35,000 miles total on the car. Just smashed in the front right a little. Insurance totaled it and gave me $18,500. Body shop told me monocoque/unibody construction is very difficult and expensive to repair. Evidently, for anything more than plastic fender-benders, they're very frequently "totaled" instead of repaired.
What about the bolt EUV? It’s not a large car by any means but it is the size of a very small SUV meaning it is just on the edge of the smallest car a US consumer will willingly buy.
I'm happy for this decision, but I'm still surprised. It's tough to sell compact/subcompact cars in the current market (Chevy hilariously pretends the car is a SUV).
I suspect that the development of their more high-end/profitable EVs is going slower than anticipated and some bean counter somewhere determined that this is the best use of the batteries they have on hand.
It's clear to me the Big 3 can no longer compete and will be even more reliant on government subsidies going forward. The midwest is one giant swing stage for presidential elections which guarantees the tap continuing to flow.
I'm definitely interested, an upgraded Bolt is a perfect second car for my family, a small daily driver. I had been curious about the upcoming Volvo EX30, but the stories from Polestar owners have me cautious.
The Chevy Bolt is reflective of what no other car company is being able to compete with Tesla.
Dealers.
The Chevy Bolt was a great product that owners almost universally loved. However, Chevy dealers would refuse to sell customers one. They certainly wouldn't promote it, and in many cases go out of their way to disparage it.
Maybe this got better with time, but at least when the Bolt was still fairly new, a friend trying to buy one was struggling to get a dealership to even let him test drive one, despite the fact that they were almost certainly available (he still got the test drive, but after much insistence from the dealer that he should test drive another car they had instead).
My wife purchased a Bolt a couple of years before COVID (and the supply chain shortages); can confirm- the dealers really didn't seem to want to sell them. Her office is only a few miles away, and she takes occasional weekend 100+ mile journeys to visit family, so the Bolt fit that bill perfectly.
The Bolt has been a great, no-nonsense option. Other than the battery recall, of course. No giant screen, no fart apps. It was the first and at the time, only reasonably priced EV that looked like a regular car, that you could actually take road trips in, and not trapped in a single city due to an impractically small range (Nissan Leaf Gen 1, BMW i3, etc.)
My local dealer refuses to let anyone test drive them. I wasn’t even allowed to sit in one when I visited. They said they’re a terrible car and I should buy something way more pricy.
The only thing I wish is more capacity for the battery. Went for a road trip from SF to Monterey, and the battery almost drained by the time we arrived.
Any reason to believe this isn't to restore demand at dealerships for existing production, and that they'll discontinue it again after inventory sells?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI don't really care how great their new stereo head is, cars last a long time and there's 0% chance they'll keep up with the phone over the long term.
Now I'm right there with you on the mechanicals and exteriors.
However, the display often ends up too low on the dash in older vehicles with a retrofit, modern cars typically place it higher on the dash almost level with the instrument cluster to make it easier to check for navigation etc, most modern cars can even sync carplay directions to a secondary display in the instrument cluster. The siri mic solution can be compromised too, depending on the vehicle and how you fit the mic. It's livable of course, but often not optimal.
I have CarPlay on my Subaru and use the Model 3 in the Bay Area. (Borrowed car [a].) Tesla's UX is unrivaled. But it still can't match Apple's seamlessness. Shitty as Siri is, it can dial my next conference call, pull up the place I was just searching for on my Mac and respond to texts, consistently and hands free.
[a] Funny enough, I had suggested a Bolt to the owner. They got uncomfortable with the thought of buying a discontinued model, and so gave Tesla their money.
No, because you will still have parts and trained technicians for it.
A car manufacturer integration fails on two counts:
1) I don't trust them to make good software. I dread to think what permissions I'd have to grant the GM app in order for it to read and write text messages but I'd fear data leaks, voice transcription errors, etc etc. and I don't want to have to choose a music/podcast service based on what they do and do not support.
2) They'd make you pay extra. You know they would. Maybe not to start but they'd introduce monthly fees for it all once they've got you locked in.
Edit: Tesla might be the exception here, but do you imagine GM is going to be shipping OS updates for a 10 year old car? I think not.
They have to, because in order to drive these features natively in your infotainment system they need active LTE/5G service.
Which is a total waste for the consumer, who likely already pays for such service for their smartphone, which has built in software designed to provide all these features to your infotainment system.
My iPhone...on my dashboard. There's far more to CarPlay than just Apple Music, and Tesla's offering isn't even close.
If automakers just can't get their act together to make a proper internet stereo/navigation system, they should develop an open standard allowing third parties to provide it instead. Not halfheartedly farm it out to the tech giants.
That's frustrating but tolerable on a $300 device. But on a $30,000 car?
We did upgrade the central computer a few years ago to get 4g support, but $1500 felt very cheap for a whole new center screen, a new higher resolution instrument cluster, and a new computer making the whole car run faster.
The beauty of CarPlay and Android Auto is that it turns your infotainment system into a dumb terminal for your smartphone. As long as it can decode the video and audio streams, there is no reason it will not continue to get new features indefinitely via phone upgrades and new versions of iOS or Android.
Our phones are perfectly capable of doing all the things these car companies want us to pay extra for.
CarPlay gives it to you for free, using the data plan you already pay for on your phone to fetch maps and stream music.
My car does not need it's own internet connection to do these things, my phone can do them just fine. And as CarPlay and Android Auto have shown, it is borderline trivial to turn the giant touchscreen in my car into a dumb terminal for my smartphone.
It's one thing to charge me a subscription for something I use regularly, it's another entirely to make me pay a subscription for something I already get somewhere else, just so I can have it in my car.
Fuck GM.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/25/gm-isnt-going-to-kill-off-...
It was one of only 2 vehicles in it's class (EV with a range extender), which was what I wanted, but being Canadian I wouldn't get the benefits half the year.
The other was the BMW i3 REx, I nearly bought one until I found out AC problems can somehow cost 5 figures to repair, effectively totalling the car.
I just gave up and bought a full EV.
...
Yet production of cars and trucks powered by Ultium batteries have been hampered by delays at a supplier that have limited GM’s capacity to build battery modules."
AFAICT, it's not so much that they love the Bolt, it's that they love the price of the Bolt. So hopefully the new version keeps compelling pricing.
Love ours too, especially now that we've finally had the battery replaced as part of that recall. The supply of batteries to the dealerships was ridiculously slow. Both they and we got tired of asking for when they'd be able to do the recall for our car.
I believe the commenter is referencing things like the Hummer EV at 9000 pounds, or 4.5 tons
Vehicle size is a classic prisoner's dilemma. In a two-car accident, the larger car is likely to fare better. So I totally understand why folks are buying crossover SUVs when they could just as easily fit in a car. Trying to guilt people into buying smaller cars than reason dictates is a losing strategy.
The only solution here is to stop subsidizing cheap oil and get rid of the weird emissions and tax loopholes that make trucks more attractive than they ought to be.
If you've ever heard about the numerous SUV rollovers in the 90s - especially on poorly designed roads (see: reduced-turning-radius cloverleaf intersections) - you would realize that collisions with other vehicles are a mere fraction of the accidents you can have.
People buy big because they can afford it - guess what, economy sucks and the used market is crazy so there is incentive for new smaller cars.
Did you only hear about them in the 90s? because in the 00s sway bars [1] became very popular so perhaps the rollovers stopped happening.
I also don't think people really consider accidents when purchasing cars or Volvo wouldn't've had such a hard time growing.
[1]: https://www.tirereview.com/sway-bar-technology/
Part of this may also align with the fact that SUVs are so varied a category that now there are 5+ size categories of SUV [1] as opposed to maybe two from the 90s - dilution of the brand in a marketable way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_(automobile)#Size_ca...
Bolt: 3,680 pounds
Model 3: 3,862 to 4,048 lbs
BMW i4: 4,680 to 5,018 lbs
BMW i3: 2,972 to 3,309 lbs
Bolt back then was $35k+ with incentives. Mine was less than $18k with incentives.
Range sucked on my FF (good enough to get me to work + back + leftover) but a) it cost half the Bolt b) had fast charging and c) I didn't have to go far to get one in stock.
I probably would have liked both of them - roomy enough to fit 5 + fast enough to enjoy the drive part. Ford discontinued the Focus, but honestly Bolt/Focus are decent EVs for a lot of people.
Certainly the stock performance (-3.87% over 5Y vs -2.12% for Ford, wouldn't be fair to bring Tesla into the conversation) doesn't help to justify her position.
In fact, an investor in January 2014 would only have to lock up their money for 5 months in Treasuries to generate the return Barra has delivered to her investors in ten years [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Barra
[2] https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/chart?p=SPY#eyJpbnRlcnZh...
[4] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/monthly-yield-curve-tab...
The S&P 500 isn't a fair comparison, but the Treasury one is. That's the risk-free rate.
The ten-year yield was closer to 6% when Barra took the helm. That's much worse!
The point of the comparison is that the return she delivered over her ten-year term was analogous to that which an investor demanded to lend to the U.S. government for a grand total of five months. It's driving home the terribleness of the return within the context of her hiring: she has failed to return anything close to GM's cost of capital.
> you are comparing with the benefit of hindsight which is not viable for any financial analysis
It's totally valid for evaluating a manager!
Selling only 49 of a vehicle in a 6-month period seems... shockingly low. Can't even imagine what kind of bottlenecks they're running into with building them.
This is an embarrassingly low number of vehicles on the Ultium platform. It inspires zero confidence that GM will be good at managing their supply chain and manufacturing electric vehicles. GM's forecasts are borderline fraud at this point. They need to come forward with a realistic roadmap ending with significant production of electric vehicles.
its hard to find a reliable used car for that price, let alone a new ev! i don't know what gm was thinking when they killed it.
https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/en/savings-calculator https://driveclean.ca.gov/node/919765
This is basically a fringe position. According to wikipedia the Bolt is classed as a "subcompact" car. In the late 2010s basically every car manufacturer exited out of the subcompact segment[1] because of lackluster sales. At least in North America, almost nobody wants subcompact cars.
>We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used.
Every time this sort of conversation comes up, pickup trucks are always brought up as the problem. Yet, if you look at sales data[2], their market share only rose modestly. Arguably they're just returning to historical trends after fuel prices came back down in the late 2010s. The fastest growing segment is actually crossovers. They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks, but I suppose they're way harder to demonize so nobody really talks about them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcompact_car#2000s_to_presen...
[2] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/the-rise-of-th...
Don't you know the outgroup is bad and the cause of our problems? /s
And they wonder why people in flyover states dislike them.
I disagree strongly with that. these are very different vehicles.
Crossovers are regulated like cars, built like cars, and anre often are roughly the same size as equivalent cars. They’re just lifted slightly off the ground (in some cases barely) and given a hatchback.
As an example, compare dimensions of a Toyota Camry to a Toyota RAV4. Most of the exterior dimensions are almost identical. The RAV4 is notably a little bit longer outside of the wheelbase and only about 200 pounds heavier.
It's the body on frame vehicles that end up being heavy and compromised much of the time - its a way of manufacturing a vehicle that stretches back practically to the stone age. I also agree crossovers do not deserve to be compared to body-on-frame construction.
In interests of not upsetting anyone - I also agree there are some limited usecases body on frame is better! But for most private passenger transport, a monocoque construction will have advantages - size, weight, fuel economy (function of weight reduction), driving dynamics, pedestrian safety etc. Body on frame can also make it easier for a commercial vehicle to offer bed customization options, given the car structurally is just a pair of rails on wheels that can be extended or shortened as application demands. A monocoque generally can't change its length as easily.
There are new pickups flirting with monocoque construction - the Honda Ridgeline, Ford Maverick, Hyundai Santa Cruz, famously the Tesla Cybertruck...
14,000 lbs is absolutely within realms of normal/possible for a nearly 20 foot long 6000lb truck - its more or less exactly the same as high-spec Ford trucks.
It's almost a given one of the first things youtube is going do with a production Cybertruck is find something that weighs almost exactly 14000 lbs and try to tow it up and down the steepest inclines they can find.
All that twisting and bending force being applied to a unibody, I can't see it ending well.
So, afaik, historical claims by Tesla on towing capacity are true so there seems to be more reason to believe a future towing claim is accurate based on previous towing claims than believe it's false because previous non-towing claims have been false.
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-7A684E2...
I think we're going to see Cybertrucks with totally trashed frames if they try to go live with 14k loads.
Another aspect is that repairability of the frame isn’t as important as preventing injury to the occupants.
You know what’s more expensive than a totaled $18,500 vehicle? Hospital bills.
I suspect that the development of their more high-end/profitable EVs is going slower than anticipated and some bean counter somewhere determined that this is the best use of the batteries they have on hand.
Dealers.
The Chevy Bolt was a great product that owners almost universally loved. However, Chevy dealers would refuse to sell customers one. They certainly wouldn't promote it, and in many cases go out of their way to disparage it.
Maybe this got better with time, but at least when the Bolt was still fairly new, a friend trying to buy one was struggling to get a dealership to even let him test drive one, despite the fact that they were almost certainly available (he still got the test drive, but after much insistence from the dealer that he should test drive another car they had instead).
The Bolt has been a great, no-nonsense option. Other than the battery recall, of course. No giant screen, no fart apps. It was the first and at the time, only reasonably priced EV that looked like a regular car, that you could actually take road trips in, and not trapped in a single city due to an impractically small range (Nissan Leaf Gen 1, BMW i3, etc.)
The only thing I wish is more capacity for the battery. Went for a road trip from SF to Monterey, and the battery almost drained by the time we arrived.