The Chevy Bolt Is Officially Dead

Chevy Bolt 2016 2023 2
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If you’ve been thinking of buying a Chevrolet Bolt, you might want to hurry up. An email sent out to Bolt customers obtained by The Autopian, and confirmed by a GM spokesperson, confirms that Chevrolet’s entry-level electric car will be discontinued after 2023.

Here’s the email:

Boltemail

 

The Bolt is one of those rare cars that hit its stride later in life. Despite a massive battery recall, price cuts and incentives ensured that this was pretty much the only affordable long-range EV with a common CCS DC fast charging connector socket. Granted, it’s only rated for 50 kW fast charging, but that’s better than nothing. Indeed, sales have taken off like wildfire, with this six-year-old Chevrolet being the best-selling non-Tesla EV in the third and fourth quarters of 2022.

This email was later confirmed by a GM spokesperson who said:

“When the Chevrolet Bolt EV launched, it was a huge technical achievement and the first affordable EV, which set in motion GM’s all-electric future. As the company continues to grow it’s EV portfolio with the Ultium platform, and as construction continues at the Orion Township, MI, assembly plant in preparation for battery electric truck production beginning in 2024, Chevrolet confirmed Bolt EV and EUV production will end late this year. Chevrolet will launch several new EVs later this year based on the Ultium platform in key segments, including the Silverado EV, Blazer EV and Equinox EV. “

This isn’t entirely unexpected news, as GM has been previewing the move since last year, but the timing is a bit of surprise. As we’ll note later in TMD, GM has revised up its revenue estimates for this year, and GM CEO Mary Barra apparently shared the news on the earnings call this morning.

The Bolt is expected to be replaced with the incoming 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV which will offer more space and tech, albeit at a higher price. Chevrolet claims an MSRP of around $30,000 for the Equinox EV 1LT, but full details are yet to be revealed. Either way, that works out to around $3,500 more than a base-model Bolt. Range is expected to clock in at around 250 miles, while DC fast charging capability gets a handy boost to 150 kW.

2022 Chevrolet Bolt euv And Bolt ev Ship To Dealers 40

If you feel like affordable new cars are rapidly disappearing, you’re not going crazy. Over the past few years, Honda, Toyota, Chevrolet, Ford, and Hyundai have all pulled out of the subcompact car segment. Edmunds reports that cars priced under $25,000 made up just 4 percent of the market in March compared to 24 percent of the market in March of 2018. With tax incentives pushing the Bolt deep into sub-$25k territory, we’re losing another option in the critical segment of cars normal people can actually afford.

Once the Bolt exits the marketplace, the only option for a sub-$30,000 new EV will likely be the Nissan Leaf S, which features a small 40 kWh battery pack, a less-common CHAdeMO DC fast charging connector, and just 149 miles of range. Fine for city use, but not brilliant for longer road trips. While it’s possible that another manufacturer could surprise us with an affordable long-range EV, the chances of that are low in the near-term.

2023 Bolt Ev Side Profile While Driving On An Urban City Street

The saga of the Bolt reminds me a lot of the Pontiac Fiero. Both were promising entry-level vehicles, both were recalled due to fire risks, and GM killed both right as they got good. Granted, the Bolt’s most memorable fire risk came from improperly-manufactured battery packs and resulted in a months-long stop-sale order, but GM and LG eventually corrected the battery pack manufacturing process, sent the Bolt back out into the world, and retrofitted existing cars with new battery packs.

As a way of making over the Bolt’s image, Chevrolet drastically lowered pricing, and highlighted how badly we need affordable new cars in the process. With a red-hot used car market and shocking new vehicle price creep, inexpensive new cars are critical for keeping Americans moving.

(Photo credits: Chevrolet)

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133 thoughts on “The Chevy Bolt Is Officially Dead”

  2. I truly do not know what to say about this move. This article and comments make the case that manufacturers, pursuing delicious profits, wish to sell only up-market “SUVs”, at least in the USA. To that end they are dropping everything else. Ford did the same. And Toyota. And Honda. It is sad, but hey, you can get an 84 month loan on a 5000lb+ behemoth SUVEV. The commenters point out that ordinary people, at this point, really just want an affordable EV for practical use. They don’t want to pay $50,000++ for a leather-lined monster EV truck-thing. GM’s solution? Eliminate all affordable cars, then (heh, heh) the proles can buy only our new EV truck-things. So, might the Chinese exploit this abandoned market niche? It has happened repeatedly in the past. Would that not be a sad day?

    1. At least when it happened in the 70s/80s with the Japanese invasion of the US auto market, Japan was/is a a democratic ally of the US.
      Same for the Koreans
      Buying Chinese cars in the US market would be much like geopolitically buying cars from Autocratic Russia or North Korea.
      Of course with our political leadership in the early 1980s w/Regan (continued by Clinton in the 90s) move to automate manufacturing in the US & Highly incentivize offshoring manufacturing to China this complicates the US instilling trade barriers, though I 100% expect this will still occur both to protect the US auto manufacturing & to try to limit China revenue generation

  3. Yes in the past they reintroduce under another name. GM will eliminate a popular cheap ev so chips spent on expensive ev. It is a shame they dont teach science and common sense in hs any more. Readers here dont seem to get science

  4. This is so bizarre to me. Two weeks ago we went EV shopping with the two contenders being a Leaf or Bolt EUV. It was tough finding Leafs to test drive, but not nearly as tough as finding a Bolt EUV or even standard Bolt to test drive. Granted, I was biased toward the Leaf after I drove a friends for a few days in Seattle, but I really did want to give the Bolt some consideration. But I just couldn’t find one, so now we have a Leaf and are very happy with it (especially since we got in right before the rule change!)

  6. It’s going to be replaced by the Silverado EV, Blazer EV and Equinox EV? Really?
    Aren’t those things , you know, trucks? Or at least excessively large?
    I don’t really see them fitting the same use case at all.

    Is this an indication that GM has decided that they can’t win a price war with Tesla model 3s?

  7. Because of Course tis is the GM way, rush something to market pay out the nose to make it right, then axe it once it actually is not too bad. Honestly with EV adoption being such a wild card, not having a direct replacement at a similar price point is a massive fail on GM’s part.

  8. Ironically, I originally pursued an MSRP swap on our ‘18 Bolt even though it wasn’t in the initial batch of battery recalls because I was concerned about the effect on resale value. Turns out they gave me a brand new ‘22 AND about $8k in cash because of the intervening price reductions. Now, I may actually see a bump in resale value now that they are being discontinued and there is no real competition for compact, fast-charging EV’s with decent range.

  9. The end of cheap financing would work wonders on righting this listing ship. But I suspect the invisible hand of Capitalism is keeping the spigot from closed off more than it is.

  10. I’ll be impressed if the Equinox is really only $3500 more. That’s not as big a price bump as I would have expected, although I have to wonder if that’s the bait and the switch will come in the second model year when they actually ship in significant numbers and suddenly are $10k more. See also the Maverick and Lightning.

    And I wonder how much range you’re going to give up in the Equinox. It’s going to be a larger and heavier car so I find it difficult to believe there won’t be a tradeoff somewhere. I’m betting the one that gets equivalent range to the Bolt will be a lot more than $3500 more expensive because it will need a much larger battery. This is not the way to make good use of limited battery resources.

    1. Range for the base Equinox is supposed to be 250 miles, about the same as the Bolt, and charging is faster. I’d rather have a compact hatchback but the Equinox seems way better than the Bolt EUV in the same kind of role.

  11. All in all my first reaction was “well fuck Chevrolet for taking away a proven winner” but then tempered that to say “well screw Chevrolet for taking away a proven winner”. Corporate greed in full on mode. Their logic escapes me. I’m literally too old to want to figure this out. If my garage wasn’t already full, I would gladly buy one of the last 2023 models.

  12. Bummer. I love my Bolt, bought it used with 25k on it (I’m pretty sure when I bought it, it was during the stop-sale period, but I’m not complaining). While the battery situation was a (very small) gamble, I came out the other end with a brand-new, larger capacity battery at around ~30k miles at no cost. It’s a perfect car for errands around town and day trips to nearby cities, and an excellent daily driver compliment to the rest of the fleet.

  13. I just bought my 2023 Bolt EV last week. It’s my second Bolt. They are great and amazing for around town and short trips that may only require one stop at a CCS charger. It’s completely loaded and after the tax credit only $24,000 net plus tax, tags. It’s also the most efficient EV, meaning it doesn’t as much energy to go the same amount of miles as other EVs, even though they may have a longer range. A great example of this is a recent TFLEV test on Youtube where it won a range comparison again a Tesla Model 3 performance. Here in western PA, there are some in stock and mostly selling for MSRP in case people are looking.

  14. Really disappointing as the Bolt figured into my retirement-era two car garage as a perfect daily driver / errand runner, leaving the other half of the space for my 911. But it isn’t a surprise. It was a good car in high demand – no wonder GM killed it.

  15. This makes so little sense. The EUV was only a 2 model year car then. They can’t keep these in stock. I couldn’t even find one to test drive last month. EV’s are ideal for commuter cars, but GM will no longer have a compact EV to haul all the single occupants to and from work. I don’t need a mid-size SUV to commute in.

    I had only bought GM vehicles for 25 years. In the last 2 years, I’ve strayed from that twice because they have some pretty big gaps in their line-up or just weren’t competitive in a segment. I would have gladly bought another Volt if GM didn’t abandon PHEV’s so early. I would have settled for a Bolt because it was a good value and size for a commuter. I ended up getting a PHEV from another brand.

  16. By the time I give in & buy an EV, nobody will be making a compact. The Equinox is great, but I’m not interested in a large EV; I just want a commuter for town use.

      1. Unfortunately we probably won’t get these here. So many issues would be solved if we could adopt Euro safety standards, so that it wouldn’t cost manufacturers millions to get a low-volume car certified here. You can’t tell me a car that is safe enough for European highways isn’t safe enough for here.

  17. Great, another relatively small and cheap car being killed for a larger and more expensive replacement. This is eventually going to kill my interest in cars entirely as I have zero interest in 4,000 lb+/$50k SUVs.

  18. I have read several articles about this, and they have stated that the Bolt was “slow selling”. You can’t find one at MSRP and you really can’t find any on a lot. The cheapest one around me is 5K over MSRP. Also, everyone who owns one loves them.

    1. But, for years you could walk into any Chevy dealer near me and get these with massive discounts. I remember a time when a $28-$32k Bolt could be had for around $14-16k including the state and federal credits.

  20. GM: “Hey – we’ve got a huge hit on our hands! We could update it and keep it rolling but.. eh, we’ll just kill it off.”

    GM’s gonna GM.

  22. I get it, but it is still sad, as there isn’t a direct replacement coming. There really needs to be affordable electric vehicle options.

    The Equinox will likely be a better vehicle and it will be bigger, but that also comes with a step up in price. (Will be interesting to see how close to 30k it comes in at. Most electric offerings come equipped with new and improved Price Bloat (TM).)

  23. One of like three new cars I would have considered as a replacement for my wife’s car – Equinox is a hard nope. Hopefully Kia will enter this segment, or maybe Nissan will turn the Leaf into a better proposition before the old car (’96 Toyota with 76K miles) gives up the ghost?

  24. And my enthusiasm for the Equinox deflated pretty quickly once they announced no Car Play or Android Auto, and instead you’d be stuck with the latest in-house solution from GM for making use of the giant tablet in your dash. No thank you.

    1. My truck has Apple car play (or whatever it is called) and I am thoroughly unimpressed. I find it easier and less distracting to pick up my phone when I need to do something. I doubt Android auto is any easier. I am basically a boomer (despite being in my 30s), so maybe I’m just not comfortable with technology, but I do not see the appeal of car play and similar systems. I’m always surprised when people say they wouldn’t buy a car without them.

        1. If your car has a good infotainment system I honestly don’t see the point of Car Play. If your infotainment system is lousy and/or doesn’t have what you need built in then I get it…but if it does? I don’t see why I need to complicate things further. My base GTI had a pretty lousy system that didn’t have nav or satellite radio built in, so I used Car Play.

          But my Kona N has the latest Hyundai/Kia/Genesis stuff which is excellent, easy to use, has built in NAV that’s updated often enough for my liking, and satellite radio. Plus it lets you multitask with two screens-I always have a map up next to SiriusXM. It works great for my needs and keeps me away from my phone while I’m driving.

          I don’t get why people want to be connected to their phones 24/7/365. One of my favorite things to do is stash my phone away for hours on end. I get that I sound like a Boomer here but I don’t really care. I want less things between me and driving. I buy fun cars specifically so the mundane can be more enjoyable. My phone will always be there when I want to come back to it.

          1. I don’t know whose infotainment is bad enough that I’d choose Car Play. I own FCA, GM, Toyota, and Ford products from the past decade, and all of them are perfectly acceptable.

            My phone is basically in my car for music/podcasts. Which I can mostly control with steering wheel buttons. I don’t use turn by turn navigation, so that isn’t a feature to me, although I do have built-in maps up on the screen usually.

            If I need to text someone at a red light, I can’t do that with Car Play. So I’m giving away functionality for zero benefit.

            1. I prefer the radio in my Leaf to the fancy infotainment system in my new F250. The Leaf has bluetooth and steering wheel controls for volume and answering calls. It is intuitive and easy to use. The F250’s infotainment system looks nicer, but it isn’t worth the trade off of being a tremendous pain in the ass to use.

                1. My truck has the Sync 3 as well (I saw “new” but it is a 2021). It isn’t terrible, but after two years I still find it hard to access some functions. I also don’t like having to use a touch screen for some functions. The system also has issues with losing contact with my phone when connected via blue tooth. Also, it randomly changes sources from my phone to an XM preview, which is super annoying.

                  I think the system probably isn’t bad, but I’m not interested in most of the features so I would prefer something simpler.

            2. You can’t physically text from the phone while using CarPlay? I guess that is a good thing for most people but I can with Android Auto. I really don’t like using voice although I do from time to time, there isn’t a restriction to just picking up your phone. I seem to remember that there was at one time but not now.

            3. Turn by turn directions imo are like 90% of the use case, so if you don’t use them (which I respect…nice to know people can still find their way around without a computer), I don’t honestly know why you’d use carplay at all.

              If you do use them, what makes Google Maps so much better than built-in nav is how quickly you can enter your destination. When I’m taking my kid to a baseball game at some random little league field in an unfamiliar town, I can usually type in the first few letters of the destination (or just click on the location link in my Gcal invite from the team manager) and it dials up accurate directions on the phone in seconds.

              Scrolling through the clumsy Volvo interface (search by name, city, point of interest…blah blah) takes forever by comparison, and if you spell it wrong it may as well not exist. It’s a painful reminder of how bad search used to be before Google.

          2. The nav is the primary benefit for a lot of people I’d say. Built-in nav was already an exception more than the norm even before the smartphone integration. It wasn’t usually an entry-level feature or a simple accessory add-on, and even if it was, why spend hundreds for something the phone you already pay for does, that doesn’t work as smoothly? Especially with systems that had inferior touch screens or no touch at all, like the joystick or touchpad systems. And then requires additional costs down the line to update the SD card or what-have-you.

            The traffic updates were commonly XM-based IIRC so if you didn’t subscribe I think you were pretty much out of luck. (I know you’re an XM proponent, but I think that’s a sub that also falls under the category like OnStar for a lot of people.)

            If I have on-board nav in my next car I feel fairly certain I’ll use that more than the phone as a lot of the systems are much better now like you say, but I wouldn’t seek it out or pay for it. It’ll take some time for the public perception to change some around it as there’s a bulk of the population that have even ~7 year old cars without ACP/AA right now and have the mindset “my next car will have it” when they’ve experienced it in a friend’s car or rental or something.

            Re: 2 screens – might have been timing of updates vs. you moving away from it, as CarPlay has displayed for nav & radio to display together for a bit now, unless yours allows you to change the nav during the split function.

          3. The number one reason is for live traffic. I would argue that Hyundai has one of the better, if not best, free traffic services built into the nav but running android auto with google maps is something that will be hard to give up. They cover nearly every street. I have multiple ways to get home and limited time to do it, traffic changes often on the 32+ mile drive. I don’t always follow the recommendations and don’t need it for guidance other than being able to view live traffic info. It is even useful for traveling just a mile away from my house, it is a rare drive that I don’t push the button to connect. Besides, our VW is easy to connect wirelessly and I have AA Auto in my Sonata N Line and configured it so I just press the star button and it pops on the screen wirelessly, along with my factory sirius xm.

        2. As an old old boomer I must ask, “What the hell is Car Play and can I turn it on with one switch or knob on my dashboard?”

          Right now I’m doing fine with Sirius XM and “Willie’s Roadhouse, channel 59.

  25. Dammit GM. I briefly test drove a Bolt EUV last month and really liked it as a possible replacement for my 2012 Volt. With the tax credit, it comfortably lands within my budget. That said, I still wanted to wait and see what the pricing was going to be on the EV Equinox. If “close to 30K” ended up being more like $35K all in, the Bolt would’ve worked out great instead.

    Fine. I also recently discovered that a nice 1st gen Porsche Panamera can be had for a bit more than $20K, so maybe that very first Brand New Car isn’t going to happen for awhile.

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