Exit the Bolt

By
eric
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Last year, GM made a big whoop about lowering the price of its Chevy Bolt EV to around $26k, which made it the least expensive EV on the market. This was taken as evidence that the cost of EVs was coming down. Huzzah! erupted the fanboi choir.

Earlier this week, GM announced it is taking the Bolt off the market – removing the least expensive EV from the market.

This leaves the Nissan Leaf, which starts at just under $30k  – for the version with 149 miles of (best case, just maybe) range, which is about a third as far as the $20k VW Jetta I recently reviewed can go on a full tank, no extra charge for the latter. If you want to be able to go about half as far – in the Leaf – as you can go in a car like the Jetta, you can opt for the “long range” model. This one can go – just maybe – 215 miles.

For about $36k.

Nissan has said it will be taking the Leaf off the market, too – for the obvious reasons. Its replacement is the Ariya, a vaguely Hitler-esque sounding thing that starts at around $43k. For this, you have an EV that can take you about as far as the Leaf with its “long range” battery could.

About 215 miles.

Nissan has hired actress Brie Larsen to sex it up.  The hope seem to be you will think about her rather about how long you’ll be waiting – and paying.

But there’s no covering up the fact that there aren’t any inexpensive EVs on the market – the latter term having an awkward mouth feel to it given the “market” for EVs is almost entirely artificial (see what would happen to the “market” for EVs if the government rescinded the massive tax-kickbacks and people who bought EVs had to actually pay for them).

Rather, the focus is on expensive EVs – models like Nissan’s Aryan (or whatever) and GM’s EV Hummer, neither of which most people can afford even if they wanted to buy one – and even with the tax kickbacks.

Even less $7,500 – the federal tax kickback – an Aryan costs the buyer about $35k – which is more than most people can afford because most people only make about twice that much annually (gross) if they make that much.

Another thing that’s interesting about the Bolt is its short life. It is interesting because it reflects the short life of EVs in general. They are like firecrackers with a very short fuse.

The “bang” is how quick they are – and then they’re gone.

The Bolt came out in 2017, barely six years ago. And now it is going away. Probably because a great deal of capital went away – the money GM spent to design the Bolt, create the tooling and so on necessary to manufacture the thing – all of which is now to be thrown away (or rather, written off – the way big corporations recoup some of their malinvestements).

GM has just reported a first quarter decline in earnings of 39 percent. That, in former times, would be taken as a clue to stop losing money.

On money-losers.

In the past, the usual practice was to keep a car in production – and on the market – long enough earn back what was spent to design it, create the tooling, get it to market and get people buying it. Ideally, for a profit – the former practice being to make money selling things people want to buy at a price they are willing and able to pay that is sufficient to make back what was spent bringing the thing to market.

Of course, that was back when there was a market.

In its place, there are mandates – and subsidies, on the other end. But even these were insufficient to justify continuing to manufacturer the Bolt, for the same reason that GM stopped manufacturing the Aztek, back when there was a market – and people weren’t tax-kickback’d $7,500 to buy one.

To be fair to the Aztek, many are still on the road. It was ugly, but it wasn’t anti-functional, as the Bolt is. It was a family-sized minivan, basically, that could take you 400 miles on a full tank and it never needed to be charged. Brand new (in 2005, the last year you could buy one new) it stickered for about $21k – which is about $33k, today. This is about $3k less than the cost of a new Nissan Leaf that can take you about half that far and about $10k less than a new Aryan that can’t take you much farther.

And both the Leaf and the Aryan – as well as the Bolt – are much smaller, far less practical vehicles, leaving aside the impracticality of vehicles that operate with the EV equivalent of less than half a tank of gas that refill in times the time it takes to put half a tank of gas back into something like the Aztek.

Which had the additional appeal of not being a kind of mobile crematorium, as the Bolt has proved to be.

As all EVs are prone to being.

But the larger point is that affordable EVs are proving to be something akin to the “vaccines” sold to the public as being “safe and effective.” When the first one proved to be a dud – in terms of “stopping the spread” – a new one was trotted out, that also didn’t. But people were assured of the efficacy as well as the goodness and merit. Just keep on taking them!

Maybe the third – or fifth time – will be the charm.

It isn’t going to get better as regards EVs, either – because it’s not supposed to. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, EVs are not meant to replace the car you are driving now. They are meant to get you out of cars – by making EVs that you can’t afford and probably don’t want to buy anyhow.

Viewed from this perspective, one begins to understand why GM – and it’s not just GM – would “commit” so fervidly to building more EVs that fewer can afford. GM having become an adjunct of the government (and vice versa). They cater to one another now.

That is the “market” of the future – of our present.

. . .

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Related posts:
  1. Another Volt… Called The Bolt
  2. Chevy Dealers Already Discounting Bolt
  3. TSA’s Latest: “Exit Portals” at the Airport
  4. No More Chrysler 300 – and Guess What’s Replacing it…
  5. Burying the Leaf

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59 COMMENTS

  1. I know this is a late post, Eric, but this article came up in my “in” box yesterday (Sunday), via the “Review Geek” website. The article is titled “We Need To Stop Obsessing With EV Range”. The author then goes on further to self-righteously assume that we all do not travel that far, and bloviates from there. I blasted the fool with an e-mail and the realities of long (9 month) cold, and dark Winters, and educated him on how worthless (and dangerous) such vehicles could be in these parts. I also pointed out to the author that I was well-aware that the powers-that-be ultimately want the rest of us out of our vehicles permanently. But, until then, HE could keep his EV, and I would keep my gas guzzler, and be free of the anxiety of getting stranded somewhere. https://www.reviewgeek.com/152048/we-need-to-stop-obsessing-with-ev-range/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=RG-NL-DN&utm_campaign=1-may-2023

  2. What I don’t get, if CAFE number are so important, why don’t the automakers make small gas cars the loss leaders instead of the electric?

    My folks have a 2018 focus that had a MSRP of 22k. A volume dealer couldn’t sell that and two others for two years. They gave up and sold it for $14,500 (just before the shortages, they are probably wishing they had held on a bit longer)to my folks. The thing had the MSRP been 14k it would have sold well (with the even smaller Fiesta at about 9k). The problem with the small gas cars,,,,, they are too expensive, so people don’t buy them. They go, well for a just a few more dollars a month more I can get an Escape crossover.

    It doesn’t help make electric look good to do that, I suppose, to sell the small cars cheap, to keep the lower end buyers in small cars instead of crossovers too.

    The Bolt had the additional problem that the electric fanboys didn’t like it. So it didn’t even appeal to the few customers there are……… They were waiting in those endless lines for a Tesla 3, when all they had to do was to go to the Chevy store and drive off in a Bolt. Most Chevy dealers have plenty of Bolts, some several models years old already that didn’t sell.

  3. Speaking of using models like Bri Larson to make EV’s sexy – there may be jokes in less polite circles about the requirements for EVs to have these large screens to give people something to do while waiting for them to charge…. the only thing lacking is none of them seem to support the Porn Hub app yet!!!

    • Well, that and milady’s “ahem” personal entertainment device works best with several horsepower worth of electricity- to keep the good vibes going so to speak. A Harley is not out of the question for said vibes…

      And I’ve already called dibs on the nationwide “EV Ranch” chain of charger station cum brothels…

  5. America has been a Fascist country since Lincoln…It is now just starting to becoming more obvious to the mentally retarded TeeeVeee watchers.

  7. Currently there are a whole bunch of electric car companies, and this is not the first time – before gasoline engines electric cars were all the rage. At the peak, just before the Great Depression, there were 128? companies making electric only vehicles. Then some genius came up with the Venturi Carburator, which made the gasoline engine a viable thing, and then all the electric car companies went away.

    Here we are again, facing yet another Greater Depression, and electric cars are the rage, yet a gallon of gasoline, that only weighs 6 pounds, will make a car go many miles. (My last tank in my little Geo Metro got 58.8 mpg – which is amazing if you think about it, because I am also an avid bicyclist, and pedaling that far is a real feat, but for only 4 bucks I can get 60 miles down the road.)

    So how can you beat that? The fact is, you can not. Eric has written and talked about this and it is a deadly point when thinking about EV’s, subsidies, and the longevity of the electric car market. Who says subsidies will continue … when the hegemon is losing it’s potency … and may be facing decades of budget crisises, and when the Republicans get back in – the EV subsidy will surely be on the chopping block.

    And something else is very real, is that replacing an electric car battery is not economically viable, and this is true for the Toyota Prius hybrid – which sells at a steep discount over 10 years old. Like a game of musical chairs, if you buy a used Prius you are taking a big chance, that you will be the sucker stuck buying a new battery – which is not easy to replace.

    If the Prius could be driven without the high voltage battery, as it has the Tercel 1.5 liter engine, then the risk would be minimized, but the fact is you can not drive it. Thus the car is a dud over 15 years old. A Prius with a dead battery is a throw away car.

    Tesla battery replacement is 10, 20k and up … and do you want to buy a Tesla when someone beside the company replaced the battery? I think not.

    —————-

    Sound familiar?

    https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g43480930/history-of-electric-cars/

    “The Ford Model T, though, was far more affordable and kept getting cheaper. The first Model T cost $850 in 1908. At the time, most electric cars were at least twice that expensive. The Model T price was under $300 by 1923 and many electric cars were 10 times as costly.

    In the mid-1910s, a Detroit Electric upgrade battery pack (with Edison’s nickel-iron cells) cost $600 all by itself.”

    Eric talks about EV’s with extended range, but at a stiff price. Well … that was the also the same back then.

    —————-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle

    “After enjoying success at the beginning of the 20th century, the electric car began to lose its position in the automobile market. A number of developments contributed to this situation. By the 1920s an improved road infrastructure improved travel times, creating a need for vehicles with a greater range than that offered by electric cars. Worldwide discoveries of large petroleum reserves led to the wide availability of affordable gasoline, making gas-powered cars cheaper to operate over long distances. Electric cars were limited to urban use by their slow speed (no more than 24–32 km/h or 15–20 mph[41]) and low range (50–65 km or 30–40 miles[41]), and gasoline cars were now able to travel farther and faster than equivalent electrics.

    Gasoline cars also overcame much of their negatives compared to electrics, in several areas. Whereas ICE cars originally had to be hand-cranked to start – a difficult and sometimes dangerous activity – the invention of the electric starter by Charles Kettering in 1912[49] eliminated the need of a hand starting crank. Further, while gasoline engines are inherently noisier than electric motors, the invention of the muffler by Milton O. Reeves and Marshall T. Reeves in 1897 significantly reduced the noise to tolerable levels. Finally, the initiation of mass production of gas-powered vehicles by Henry Ford brought their price down.[50] By contrast, the price of similar electric vehicles continued to rise; by 1912, an electric car sold for almost double the price of a gasoline car.[11]

    Most electric car makers stopped production at some point in the 1910s. Electric vehicles became popular for certain applications where their limited range did not pose major problems. Forklift trucks were electrically powered when they were introduced by Yale in 1923.[51] In Europe, especially the United Kingdom, milk floats were powered by electricity, and for most of the 20th century the majority of the world’s battery electric road vehicles were British milk floats.[52] Electric golf carts were produced by Lektro as early as 1954.[53] By the 1920s, the early heyday of electric cars had passed, and a decade later, the electric automobile industry had effectively disappeared.[54] “

    • Why do people keep posting this?

      A refurbished Prius battery is under $2k, including installation:

      https://greenbeanbattery.com

      Only ~$1,700 for a refurb for the Prius C, a Prius even Eric likes.

      It’s the massive “full EV” battery packs that cost 5 figures to replace.

  8. So, GM’s telling the truth now? “Lowering the price”? Gotta admit…if it’s no longer being offered sale, you can’t buy it, so it costs nothing. That IS lower than what it formerly costeded!

    • Vehicles that will be easily disabled or require thick heavy armor to protect their heavy battery packs. Fuel tanks can be made resilient by design with interior compartments and so on. So a little fuel was lost… it still goes. If the vehicle gets out of the firefight the fuel tank can be patched up and it’s back in action. And even if the fuel tank were armored it still gets lighter as fuel is used.

      • Hi Brent,

        How disastrous would it be if Granholm got her wish for ALL-ELECTRIC military vehicles in the U.S. military, especially in the current proxy war against Russia or the next war the criminal enterprise aka the U.S. government starts? And if a vehicle or tank needed to charge up in the middle of a battlefield, would there be a Tesla EV charging station nearby?

        • Hi John,

          The woman’s an imbecile – she looks like a water head. How much does a tank weigh? How much battery weight would it take to move a tank? Probably the weight-equivalent of another tank. Where will the ammo go?

          • Eric,

            Exactly. And if military vehicles have to charge up in the middle of a battle, I’m sure whoever service members are fighting will take advantage of that to our detriment. And with this obsession from the Biden regime and certain governors with DISARMING people who own guns, will there also be some anti-gun zealot calling for disarming people in the military?

    • That’s assuming there will be a US military in 2030, or even a US by then. Neither are that cast in stone certain. Especially with morons like her in charge.

    • I think it’s a great idea – let Uncle get a good taste of his own medicine, plus maybe think twice before getting involved in any more forever wars.

  11. We used to laugh about the Aztek and there was a Buick something or other that was the same. I still see them all the time. It must be a decent car. Living where I do, in Michigan, most cars don’t live that long.

  12. What may be going on is that GM has signaled the start of EV production slashing, the quant nerds ran the numbers, board room meetings were scheduled, hands were a wringing, and they made a command decision to dump the bolts on the production floor. Call it an omen of things to come. IMO this is only the start.

    That, BTW, is a “wave repeat” of GM’s EV1 termination. 20 years ago they killed the EV!:

    wiki: “In late 2003, General Motors, then led by CEO Rick Wagoner, officially canceled the EV1 program.[11][48] GM stated that it could not sell enough of the cars to make the EV1 profitable”

    Hollywood made a movie narrated by Martin Sheen about what happened, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” (2006).

    ————-

    Are EeeeeVeeee’s a flash in the pan? Question, how long can government subsidies run, when in fact, the US Gov is technically bankrupt and 32 trillion in debt, and in a budget ceiling fight down the last dollar? Everyone fell for it, everyone got onboard the craze when the fact is, electric cars can never be anything more than a specialty mark with limited appeal.

    The corporate dummies are guilty of groupthink, everyone got on board the EV craze and now reality is setting in – and whoever gets out first loses the least amount of capital. GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and now we are in the next crash – interest rates are up – and death bells are ringing for so many meme stocks.

    It is amazing how much these corporate officers make compared to how stupid they are. The first way to save some bucks is cut all corporate salaries by half. They don’t design the car, they do not tool the factory, or assemble the car, or sell the car, so why in the hell do they make so much money when, in fact, they do nothing but make bad decisions?

  13. Most of the car buying public still has not learned the lesson of staying away from General Motors dealerships….

  14. ‘models like Nissan’s Aryan (or whatever)’ — eric

    Gonna get me one of them Nissan Aryans and name her White Lightning … ah ha ha hah!

    It’s not quite as catchy as the imaginary Denbeigh Super Chauvinist reviewed by Car and Driver in 1967 [“Heater: suspected”].

    https://tinyurl.com/j9peby3k

    But it should still be quite the minge wagon. 😉

  15. ‘evidence that the cost of EVs was coming down. Huzzah! erupted the fanboi choir.’ — eric

    Here’s a fanboi on blotter acid, groovin’ to his own beat:

    ‘Now a base Model 3 in the US – classified as near-luxury – lists for $39,990 on Tesla’s website, not including rebates. That’s about 13% below the average transaction price of all new vehicles. [Dig it! — ed.]

    ‘Tesla has changed the dynamic of the auto industry. At scale, [EeeVees] are now cheaper to produce than ICE vehicles, as demonstrated by Tesla’s profit margins and price cuts. And EVs are so easy to build that a whole new generation of startups has piled in.

    ‘Legacy automakers … going upscale and jacking up prices on their ICE vehicles is going to fail in face of the surging competition from EVs. Over the longer term, they have to price their ICE vehicles to be competitive with EVs.’

    https://tinyurl.com/3wacstff

    Dude, stop it, please … I sprained my diaphragm from laffing so hard. Now I’ve fallen on the floor and I can’t get up. 🙁

  16. Bolt gets discontinued so GM can charge more.

    Now their cheapest EV will start supposedly @ $30k, but I bet it’s gonna be more like $35k by the time it actually goes on sale.

    • Automakers are struggling to find a way to make a profit on BEVs or at least non luxury BEVs. The simple fact is that without government that’s not going to happen. What they need to do is step it up and fight government. They need ads that tell people government is going to take away the remaining cars they want. Most people don’t have a clue why their favorite vehicles disappear from the showrooms.

      PS: the dashboard login to see comments has been auto-disabled by the word press software fighting off some sort of attack. Or so the error message says.

  20. Somewhat off topic: My electric coop wants to change their fee structure, hoping to reduce their need for expensive “peak demand” power between 16:00-21:00. This is when solar stops producing of course. Back in the early days of electricity “the grid” was designed to follow demand through the day: Industrial and commerical use during the day, residential use at night. But that’s not how things work anymore, the demand is much more even and tied to outside temperature and cooking/laundry more than industrial process. So now there’s all this excess electricty being produced in the afternoon and none when it is needed.

    So now they want to raise the flat “connection fee” and move people more to a time demand system:

    Optional Time of Day Rate – Starting September 2023

    Peak Hours: 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm
    7 Days a Week

    Membership Fee $16.00 / month currently $11/mo
    Delivery Charge – Off Peak $0.022 / kWh
    Delivery Charge – On Peak $0.088 / kWh
    Energy Charge – Off Peak $0.041 / kWh
    Energy Charge – On Peak $0.163 / kWh
    WeCARE Fee 2%
    Peak Demand Charge None
    On-Peak Total $0.251 / kWh
    Off-Peak Total $0.063 / kWh

    A quarter for a kilowatt? Better make sure you program your EV to charge after 9:00 or you’ll get a big surprise at the end of the month. Hope you don’t need to go somewhere right away. Sure, most of your life runs BAU. But not always.

    We’re all part of a big experiment that if it goes wrong will destroy 150 years of techological progress. All because bureaucrats want order from chaos.

  21. Friend of mine has a Chevy Volt, which I’ve ridden in a few times and is a very nice car. I was looking into getting one myself back then but I guess since it was a hybrid and affordable it didn’t fit the agenda of the PTB for gimping our travel. So to misquote the soup nazi “No Volt for you!”

  22. GM plans to replace the Bolt with an electric Blazer, waiting for that to go up in smoke. I’m running out of popcorn, sheesh.

  23. Hiring Brie Larson is Nissan attempting to make EVs about female empowerment.

    Captain Marvel. Just like Musk is The Real Life Tony Stark.

    Unfortunately for Nissan, “The Marvels” may be the end of Brie Larson’s run in the role.

  24. GM announced it is taking the Bolt off the market and dedicating the factory space to EV pickups? The by far least usable of any EV? I worked out of a pickup for most of my working life. I NEVER looked at them as anything other than a tool, and still don’t. An EV pickup is about as far from a real tool as you can get.
    My former wife almost had a seizure when I brought home a new pickup, and promptly slid my tool box in it, raking off a considerable amount of paint from the bed. It was of no concern to me, as I knew nearly all the paint would be scratched up or gone in less than a year. She wanted it to look “nice”. I didn’t polish my pipe wrenches, why would I polish my truck?

    • haha, did the same John. new truck, scratch…………………. people/friends were aghast at my abuse of such.
      I simply said the same thing. This is a tool to me, in 3+ yrs i will get another one and the dealer will be salivating over it that I’m giving him a truck with 50-70K on it, and get another one. And they can certify it, which most want. They have NEVER looked in the bed. The outside and inside look new, and I’m sure they gave the beds a quick coat of paint and make a quick 5K+ on it.

  25. So much for the narrative that EVs were becoming MORE affordable. And with “The Left’s” sudden hatred for Elon Musk after he purchased Twitter last year, what will they do if someday the ONLY EVs available out there are TESLAS, especially when the Biden Thing is hell bent on shoving EVs down the general public’s throats?

  26. “They are meant to get you out of cars”

    And that’s the catch, just like president potato’s fiat that those of us with super credit be punished by subsiding mortgages for those with bad credit. Potato’s Bolsheviks are intent on destroying the middle class.

    • Mike,

      There seems to be no limit to how outrageous the Biden Thing will go. After the regime’s decree that homeowners with good credit will pay MORE on mortgages to subsidize mortgages for people with bad credit, I wouldn’t put it past them to impose a fee on people who drive gas powered vehicles to subsidize people who buy an EV, or even a fee on “Unvaccinated Americans” to subsidize health care for those who’ve been vaxxed but ended up having all sorts of health problems afterward.

      • Indeed. Had the Edsel, with its innovations sans styling, been introduced as a brand truly apart from Ford, it might have made it. For Ford it was an awkward fit between Ford and Mercury.

        However, like Studebaker/Packard, American buyers were more influenced by styling than what was under the skin. Weird grills just don’t sell, as proven by Studebaker.

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