GM killed the Chevy Bolt — and the dream of a small, affordable EV – The Verge
The Chevy Bolt’s demise underscores a trend toward larger, heavier, more expensive EVs
GM will convert the Chevy Bolt assembly factor into producing huge, oversized Silverado EV pick up trucks that cost a fortune.
Instead of efficient EVs, we will have massively inefficient EVs that are very expensive. This makes no sense – but makes a lot of cents for GM. The rest of the world, however, has choices including small and efficient EVs. The US approach to EVs is madness.
Other parts of the world already or soon will have their choice of many compact and affordable EVs, including ones made by GM itself. Instead, we’ll get cars and trucks with obscene amounts of horsepower and oversize battery packs that cost more to produce and charge and aren’t practical for the kind of driving most Americans actually do.
With high price tags (many over $100k) few EVs are made for normal people at this point in time. They are mostly high end, luxury, sports cars, are oversized.
The GM Hummer EV has an MPGe rating of 47 while the Bolt is 120 MPGe and the Tesla Model 3 is 132. A lot of this warped perspective comes from the automobile media, like Car and Driver, that pans any car that doesn’t have lots of horsepower, since that is the only metric that matters to them.
One of our first cars was a 1976 Toyota Corolla rated at 55 horsepower (and weighing under 2000 pounds), and a 2nd car was a 1980 Datsun 210 (65 horsepower), which at the time, got over 40 mpg on the highway. Today’s Corolla has a 169 horsepower engine and weighs almost 3,000 pounds. The Datsun brand name was ended and replaced by Nissan, who no longer has a comparable car. Most “small cars” today have 140 to 200 horsepower.
The 1976 Corolla had a real world mpg of about 33-36. Today’s bigger engine Corolla has an EPA rating of 32 mpg. Imagine the mileage that would be possible if the engine were half the size, car weight was closer to the original 2,000 pounds – wow – we’d probably be looking at 70+ mpg cars!
Here’s how Car and Driver persuades everyone they must have ever more horsepower, in this description of the new Corolla:
The most powerful Corolla gets a four-cylinder engine with a mere 169 horsepower that fails to accelerate the car with any verve.
2023 Toyota Corolla Review, Pricing, and Specs (caranddriver.com)
They prefer the new hybrids (gas/EV) having 500 to 600 hp. Good grief.
The goal is to supersize everything – it’ll be massive and inefficient, but it’s electric so it must be great!
This will be the year with the highest number of new electric car unveils and launches. 50+ new EV models are debuting or launching for customers, and unsurprisingly most are SUVs.
Best Hybrid and Electric Cars of 2023 and 2024 – Car and Driver
After reviewing the new cars today, I plan to just keep driving my 2015 Honda Fit forever. Amazingly, even as an ICE vehicle, it’s lifetime carbon emissions will likely be less than the lifetime emissions of the electric behemoths.
