Chevy Bolt EV is returning to market, months after GM scrapped it
Published 2:11 pm Tuesday, July 25, 2023
- General Motors said Tuesday it plans to bring back the Chevrolet Bolt, which will use Ultium battery technology. This photo shows Ultium cell assembly in August 2022 at the Ultium facility in Warren, Ohio. (Roger Mastroianni/Ultium Cells LLC/TNS)
General Motors said it will bring a new model of the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle to market on an undisclosed date, reversing its decision three months ago to scrap the company’s most popular and affordable EV.
Demand appears to have been key. “We can’t build enough Bolts right now,” CEO Mary Barra said during the company’s quarterly earnings call.
The vehicle has also been a magnet for bringing new buyers to GM, the company said. About 70% of buyers who trade in a vehicle for a Bolt are trading in a non-GM vehicle, the company said.
The new Bolt will include GM’s latest Ultium battery technology, the company said. But GM on Tuesday reported new difficulties with that tech, disclosing “unexpected delays” in producing Ultium battery modules because a supplier of automated manufacturing equipment has been “struggling with delivery issues.”
Production of Ultium battery cells is “ahead of schedule,” but there are delays assembling those cells into clusters known as modules, GM said.
The company has dispatched GM engineers to the equipment supplier to speed up deliveries and is assembling more battery modules manually, Barra said.
GM built 50,000 EVs in North America in the first half of 2023, about 80% of which were the Bolt EV and the slightly larger Bolt EUV, which use an older, non-Ultium battery. GM is planning to build roughly 100,000 EVs in the second half, Barra said.
The decision to kill the Bolt had disappointed some EV enthusiasts, who lamented the loss of one of the market’s smallest, most affordable EVs. The sticker price starts at $26,500, with the car also qualifying for a $7,500 federal tax credit.
The Bolt has been a rare example of a car still priced less than $30,000 as new vehicles grow more expensive, pricing many U.S. buyers out of the market.