Currently, the Bolt is a phenomenally cheap electric car. Bang-for-the-buck it's unmatched! And people are, I think rightfully, upset that we'll be losing such an affordable option.

But there's a logical reason for its affordability: its underpinnings are from 2016.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. But the car is flat out BAD at DC-fast charging.

The Bolt is a car that I could only recommend if you have charging at-home and are content with never taking on a road trip.

This is the Achilles heel of the car that the broader public is probably unaware of.

Its long range is let down by the fact that you pretty much need - at minimum - a 45 minute charging session after every couple of hours of driving.

Some folks are gonna be OK with that, but many aren't. And honestly, a Bolt taking up a precious fast-charging stall for an hour is a meme in electric car circles.

Could the Bolt be refreshed with a better and faster battery pack? I mean, probably! But it's still a very compact car that is, like it or not, unpopular in this market.

I didn't consider one for myself because it's frankly too small for me. And the 800V architecture of the E-GMP cars from Hyunda/Kia was just too tempting to pass up.

Anyway, the Ultium platform that GM's rolling out is a much more capable platform, and it makes complete sense for them to abandon the Bolt's underpinnings.

The tech in the Bolt simply cannot work for the mass market.

It's a fantastic runabout, and can even work with pretty extreme commutes!

But if you can't charge at home or work, it's a real pain in the ass to live with. In that way, it's a lot like last-gen tech. Great for a specific group of people, but not great for many others.

If you'd like a real reason to be mad at GM, well of course there's a smorgasbord of entrees to choose from, but their decision to drop Apple CarPlay / Android Auto from future EV offerings is really quite bad.

If they don't let up from that, I won't be recommending their products.

Fin

@TechConnectify See, dumping the Apple/Android stuff was great news to me when I heard it. I needba new car soon and the tech stuff is my biggest concern. Not a huge fan of Apple/Google to begin with, but they build products designed to last 2-3 years. I'm currently driving a 2009. A car needs tech built to last *decades*. And hey, maybe they'll use less flat touch screens and give us knobs and buttons again. Maybe Chevy will finally re-learn how to make an aux jack that doesn't have a minimum of five seconds and a maximum of several MINUTES of lag! On an analog input! Maybe we can get a car that isn't constantly sending notifications demanding access to my text messages when I'm just trying to play some music! Why does my '09 Pontiac have a better setup than literally any car I've seen since??

The entertainment systems in cars over the last ten years have been atrocious. More competition in that space cannot be a bad thing IMO.

@admin But see, with CarPlay and Android Auto, the car's infotainment system is handed over to your phone and stays as up-to-date as your phone is.

I plug my 2023 phone into the 2017 Bolt and now it has an infotainment system from 2023. GM doesn't need to worry about updating it, and (for instance) dropping support for 3G modems won't matter because the only modem you need is in your phone.

@TechConnectify Ehh...pretty sure most of my Android devices have not actually supported that, so I dunno about all that...and I'm not sure I want my next ten years of phone purchases to be dictated by what's compatible with my car.

I like the humble aux in. It's compatible with everything, and pretty much will be forever. I like knobs and buttons on the console so I can make adjustments without having to take my eyes off the road.

I also don't particularly want my car to have internet access...and I CERTAINLY don't want a third-party company to have the ability to remotely push an update that could break compatibility with significant features of the car. Because again...can you trust them over a timescale of decades? I don't.

@admin If you have a phone from within the last 5 years it probably does.

At its core, AA/CarPlay are just a slighty-fancy screen-mirroring tech. A audio/video feed from your phone gets sent to the car's display, and the car forwards touchscreen and other inputs back to the phone.

It's been a standard feature in the market for a long time, now. Dropping it in favor of a baked-in, locally-running software suite isn't something I'm a fan of.

@TechConnectify Yeah, I know I'm weird for expecting to still have control over the things that I purchase...lmao

This stuff feels about on par with the subscription heated seats style of nonsense...but possibly worse because it's not even the manufacturer threatening to cut me off, it's some unrelated third-party.

Did you see the NYT article a while back where a guy lost access to his phone number, contacts list, email, online banking, etc because Google scanned his texts to his son's pediatrician and didn't like what they saw? Google even sent the police to raid his home...the police concluded that there was no reason for all that and he had done nothing wrong but months later he was still banned from Google. Google was his ISP, his cell carrier, his email provider...so all of that was gone. Lost phone backups, online docs and photos, etc. And he was locked out of his online banking and other services that use texts or email as two factor authentication too. Not because he broke the law or even violated the terms of service, but because he asked his doctor for medical advice and the doctor asked for a picture and some Google moderator looked through those messages and didn't like what they saw. Even after the NYT got involved he stilt didn't get any of that restored. He's just lucky he didn't use Nest or he wouldn't even have been able to set the thermostat in his own home anymore!

And yeah that probably seems a bit irrelevant, I get it...but we can't always trust these companies to do the right thing, we can't trust that they won't boot you off their service at any time for any reason...so people making their entire lives so dependent on a single private multinational corporation is pretty scary sometimes...and I personally try my best to avoid that situation.

And it doesn't even have to be that extreme...Google discontinues products all the time. What happens if you buy a car intending it to last ten years and after five Google drops support for it? If it's Chevy's own tech you can sue them for loss of functionality; but if it's Google's tech? Well, Chevy will just say it *is* still compatible and it's not their fault your device no longer supports it. It still works as advertised from their end...