GM says cusstomers “love today’s Bolt” — so much that it will live on past this year.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that kicks off when an automaker announces it’s going to flat-out kill off a particular nameplate: Sales go through the roof. Chevrolet Camaro sales have picked up 54% this year, for example, but that’s nothing on the electric Bolt. General Motors evidently looked at Chevy’s mainstay EV’s quarterly performance — Bolt deliveries picked up 361% this year, to 33,659 units — and announced Tuesday that it would not drop the car from the lineup after all.
“Our customers love today’s Bolt,” said GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra in a statement. “We will keep the momentum going by delivering a new Bolt…and we will execute it more quickly compared to an all-new program with significantly lower engineering expense and capital investment by updating the vehicle with Ultium and Ultifi technologies and by applying our ‘winning with simiplicity’ discipline.”
Short version: GM may well just refresh the existing Bolt’s design (the company did just facelift the car for 2022) while updating the battery pack to its Ultium series that underpins new EVs like the Cadillac Lyriq and GMC Hummer EV. That will ensure the Bolt will be out of production for as little time as possible and Chevrolet won’t lose conquest sales to rivals in the more affordable part of the electric car market. That is, if GM executes its plan to update the Bolt while also rolling out the Blazer EV, Equinox EV and Silverado EV this year.
As with those three launches, we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next year or so.
While it came in fairly early compared to some of the competition, GM has been relatively slow to roll out new Ultium models. The company announced back in 2020 that it would launch up to thirty electric models by 2025, and we’re less than two years away at this point. The Chevy Bolt is by far the company’s hottest-selling EV, so it makes a great deal of sense to try and keep its foothold in less expensive areas of the market where people can actually buy EVs, without ceding ground to the likes of Tesla, Hyundai and others.
GM will announce a firmer timetable to launch the revamped Chevy Bolt at a later date. At this point, it’s almost certain we’ll see something emerge next year, though it’s not entirely clear how comprehensive the update will be. The automaker also didn’t go into detail on whether it would effectively maintain two Bolt models (the standard hatchback and the EUV crossover), or if it will drop one of those options. We may just see the Bolt EUV moving forward, as today’s buying market skews heavily toward crossovers, or GM could drop the EUV instead, leaving the Bolt EV hatchback as an affordable option while folks wanting a crossover can move toward the Equinox EV.
