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The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#81

Post by zippergz »

RKoutnik wrote: post #19

This 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…

If you don't care about the electric drive, there are MUCH nicer cars available at the same price as a Tesla. It doesn't even compare. This is why I don't have a Tesla. I could afford one, but I have spent a lot of time in them, and they do not feel like a car in the price range that they are. The interior is fine, but not premium. The touch screen makes it feel like you're driving a computer, not a vehicle (not in a good way). The styling is obviously entirely subjective, but I think that most cars in the Model S's price range look nicer, and the Model X is downright ugly.

While it may sound like I'm anti-Tesla, I'm really not. I'm glad they're pushing this market forward, and I have many friends who have one and are very happy with it. I'm just saying that I don't buy the argument that it's a great car for the price if you ignore the fact that they "happen to be electric."

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#82

Post by Spooky23 »

vvanders wrote: post #48
forgetsusername wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People are bitter because GM has a history of screwing the customer WRT electric vehicles. Many people wanted to buy their EV-1 but instead they sent them to the crushers. Like other people have said, GM is doing this to offset their truck/suvs and not out of a real interest in EVs.

I don't think that's a fair statement. They shipped the Volt when Tesla was mostly vapor.

The Bolt isn't like the electric Fiat they they just shoved a battery into.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#83

Post by gizmo »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"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…

How much lithium batteries degrade depends on their type. High current cells have different characteristics from high capacity cells, for instance. Tesla puts them in groups of 75 cells in parallel so they draw a minimal amount of current from each cell, thereby prolonging the life of the battery. They also monitor the health of the battery cells so they degrade as evenly as possible.

100,000 miles at 265 per charge (85kWh) is 377 charges. During typical behavior (commuting) the car will remain above 70% charged at all times. That by itself cuts the degradation roughly in 3rds. So we're looking at a 125 full charge cycle equivalent after 100,000 miles. So about 8% capacity loss sounds about right. No additional trickery required.

Apparently there is significant room for improvement here too:

> CEO Elon Musk once referred to a battery pack Tesla was testing in the lab. He said that the company had simulated over 500,000 miles on it and that it was still operating at over 80% of its original capacity.

https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-da...

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#84

Post by jblow »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"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…

Your figures are way wrong.

I have an original Tesla Roadster, bought in 2010, with a battery that is basically the first thing they figured out how to do in order to put a car together. (The Model S battery is much more advanced). I drove the Roadster daily for 6 years, and I had about 12% capacity loss after those 6 years. This was a much better situation than Tesla projected (I don't remember what they said at the time, but it was something like 30-40% loss at 7 years, and for a relatively low price they sold an optional battery replacement plan that kicks in at 7 years).

Supposedly the Model S's chemistry is much, much better. Just saying "they're lithium batteries" is kind of a red herring, because there are many many subclasses of lithium battery, and at least according to Musk the fact of lithium is not nearly the most important part, but what really matters is the composition of the cathode and anode: https://chargedevs.com/features/tesla-tweaks-its-battery-che...

[Edit: And the theory that they would have preemptively hobbled the car's maximum range by (.85^6) is just crazy, because it means they could instead have advertised a car that had THREE TIMES THE RANGE on its initial launch, and "range anxiety" was one of the biggest issues they had to overcome. They could have said OUR CAR GOES SIX HUNDRED MILES ON ONE CHARGE, which would be way more important than hiding some degradation.]

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#85

Post by coredog64 »

vvanders wrote: post #48
forgetsusername wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People are bitter because GM has a history of screwing the customer WRT electric vehicles. Many people wanted to buy their EV-1 but instead they sent them to the crushers. Like other people have said, GM is doing this to offset their truck/suvs and not out of a real interest in EVs.

Had they sold them they would have had to produce spare parts for 10 years. Maybe it was cheaper to crush them?

Offsets are nothing new. Ford used to sell Escorts near or below cost in order to sell Crown Vics.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#86

Post by mrfusion »

5ilv3r wrote: post #26
sfeng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regen built into pedals feels strange to people not used to it. As does the regen which activates when you lift your foot off the gas. This was not done because they're incompetent, it was done to create a car which is more intuitive to people not used to electric cars.

I've never heard of an efficiency enhancing feature not being automatic. That would be like overdrive defaulting to off, or having to manually enable cylinder deactivation. People would use it more if it was in the pedal's logic.

Maybe it requires human intelligence to be efficient like the matrix.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#87

Post by colechristensen »

_ea1k wrote: post #79
colechristensen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The yearly losses are fixed, unrelated to usage. The per-cycle losses are indeed less when you don't fully discharge, but only by a relatively small amount. Lets say you have a battery with a capacity of 100. Empty it completely 100 times and the capacity might be around 95. Empty it only 20% 500 times (for the same total energy usage) and it's capacity might have only degraded to 97. Better, but not nearly enough to…

That assumption is actually incorrect. Data: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li... Table 2 shows the lifespan of a typical Lithium Ion battery based upon various discharge depths. 100% discharge rates degrade to less than 70% of original capacity after only 300-500 cycles. 25% discharges hit the same value after 2,000-2,500 cycles. That level of discharge is fairly common with cars like the…

>25% discharges hit the same value after 2,000-2,500

This is exactly the point (and easy to miss)

The degredation per energy used is about the same.

1 cycle of 100% = 4 cycles of 25%

So the 300-500 cycle loss is equivalent to 500-625 when you divide the number of recharge cycles by 4. You _must_ do this for an apt comparison because what you should be interested in is how your capacity deacys with usage.

Artificially smaller capacities also means that using the supercharger is more common. Another feature of lithium battery chemistries is losing capacity faster at higher charge/discharge rates. Trickle charging overnight will cause significantly lower cycle decay than supercharging in an hour (or whatever period it is)

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#88

Post by gozur88 »

marcell wrote: post #70

Reading between the lines, I think this car is a trick and not meant to sell at all. They get fleet wide mileage credits by producing it, and they are losing money on each car. Electric cars are easy to make, especially if you don't put much effort into it (example: regenerative brake paddle is separate from normal brake paddle). Dealers don't make as much from servicing electric cars. I suspect the fact that it's ug…

>I suspect the fact that it's ugly is a feature: it will hamper sales a bit and reduce the chance that they'll need to produce lots of this car.

I doubt that. I'm sure GM would be perfectly happy selling millions of these things if consumers were willing to buy. They're in the business of selling cars, after all.

But I also doubt they'll put much effort into it.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#89

Post by twblalock »

codeulike wrote: post #13

I think it looks fine. You Americans have a weird dislike of hatchbacks. To European eyes, it just looks very normal. Good luck to GM but I suspect their dealerships won't bother trying to sell many of these.

Americans love hatchbacks when they are called crossovers, SUVs, or minivans. They just don't like the small ones.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#90

Post by Spooky23 »

RKoutnik wrote: post #19

This 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…

Tesla has to do that because their product line isn't very diversified.

GM has the benefit of selling everything from heavy trucks to tiny cars. Tesla has to invest lots of capital in chargers and a direct sales model.

Personally, I think the ROI on any car is crap, and I don't buy fancy vehicles. The Bolt makes a lot more sense to me.

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