Is this a sponsored article by GM? I'm honestly curious.
The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
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Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#32Let's hope they didn't get first to market at this level by cutting corners on battery quality and use batteries that degrade quickly. Time will tell, I suppose. At least we know that Tesla's batteries degrade very little even after 100,000 miles used.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#33"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.
Tesla also includes the tax credit in their price. And at present they don't even have a car.
Why are people so bitter that GM is competing? Is this not a good thing?
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#34This article (like many) misses why people buy Teslas. Teslas are amazing cars that just happen to be electric - not the other way around. The large car companies think that "electric" is enough to sell a car, whereas Tesla knows they need luxury options, autopilot & the supercharger network. I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car, not just an electri…
I don't doubt you're correct in summarising why many current Tesla owners buy Tesla cars. But if they want to be hugely, mass market successful they need to expand their client base beyond customers who "need" luxury options in a car. It's Tesla that would need to match GM's market proposition, not vice versa.
> I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.
And I suspect many Bolt owners want an economical car, not a luxury one, and the Bolt's got that in spades.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#35So a leaf with a +20 mile upgrade would beat it easily in everything including ugly points? Neat. Way to flop again, GM. I've got a crumby idea: How about a long range EV with a dual pack system, like a dual tank pickup truck. You could get away with half the charger and half the wire capacity, and still get nearly 2x the range.
Where'd you get +20 miles from? The Leaf has a 108 mile range, the Bolt has a 238 mile range - that's a huge difference.
There's a LEAF available with 125 mile range, and next year's model is said to have a 60kWh battery (meaning 200+ miles).
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#36"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same.
Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles.
This has to be a lie. Unless they've come up with a new magical battery chemistry.
Lithium batteries degrade. 15-20% capacity loss per year. 2-5% per hundred cycles.
There are ways to cheat though, design your battery electronics to pretend to have a lower capacity at first and then gradually allow them to discharge more and more as the battery ages. It's true that there's a small boost to capacity retention if you don't fully discharge.
A new Tesla might well have an actual 400 mile range the day it comes off the lot, but they figure consumers would be really disappointed if that 400 mile range went to 350 after a year and so on... instead I'm guessing they pretend the battery capacity starts lower so that it's more consistent. In the end when they run out of spare room they'd initially left themselves the battery would fail fast.
What's to prevent a competitor to cut just a few corners on this strategy – don't give yourself as much future wiggle room so that you can say your capacity is higher?
I would actually love to be wrong, but what you see from the battery performance metrics just doesn't match up with any of my existing knowledge about how battery cells work.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#37Tesla proved that eco-minded cars didn't need to be ugly, yet ALL other manufacturers continue to produce only ugly cars (they don't get points for bootstrapping hybrid models of existing cars). I am amazed none of the other purveyors of electric cars have managed to figure this out. Even the BMW offering ranks high on the "God what the hell" scale in terms of its design. The Prius started this stupid trend of cars f…
Tesla also has the worst interior of any premium car company. It has the unique combination of feeling cheap: unappealing leather, plastic finishes as well as tacky: the giant computer screen.
It's all fine if Tesla is competing with Mazda but they aren't. And frankly they need to do much better in the future to go against the likes of Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover etc.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#38Why are diesel cars hated in the US? You can get a range of diesel car sin Europe which give you 50-60mpg, have all kinds of comforts and can be cheap, without the trickery of tax credits.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#39Tesla proved that eco-minded cars didn't need to be ugly, yet ALL other manufacturers continue to produce only ugly cars (they don't get points for bootstrapping hybrid models of existing cars). I am amazed none of the other purveyors of electric cars have managed to figure this out. Even the BMW offering ranks high on the "God what the hell" scale in terms of its design. The Prius started this stupid trend of cars f…
I can't understand the chain of events that happened in BMW to arrive at the i3 design.
They deliberately wanted something to look different from any of their other cars.
Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
#40So a leaf with a +20 mile upgrade would beat it easily in everything including ugly points? Neat. Way to flop again, GM. I've got a crumby idea: How about a long range EV with a dual pack system, like a dual tank pickup truck. You could get away with half the charger and half the wire capacity, and still get nearly 2x the range.
The 200mi Leaf isn't out until 2018, and even then, the bigger 60kWh battery won't come standard. The fact that there's a 238mi EV available today for less then 30 grand is a huge achievement.