tbh I continue to say the i3 scale/weight was what mass market EV transportation should have been designed towards (and more efforts focused on public trans than single/small n occupant cars). Societal/environmental cost of 6000-7000 lb behemoths erase any emissions gains from going EV.
The biggest failing of the i3, in my opinion, is that it looked stupid. It was cheap and "dorky" looking for no obvious reason. There was nothing that stopped BMW from making it look like any of their other models but they chose to make it weird and different in a way that surely hurt its sales. A real shame, honestly.
The Bolt looked nearly as dorky and they sold plenty of those. Even with the battery recall. I doubt GM made much if any profit though. LG chemicals sure didn't.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.
If range was the main criteria, of course it's not competitive.
In weight (or lack of a weight penalty), power efficiency, vehicle handling dynamics, and size efficiency it was hugely competitive - for miles per kWh, it was not surpassed until the current get Ioniq/EV6 came out.
Someone pointed out thought - in a scenario where you charge your car nightly like your phone, absolute range (and thus excessively large/heavy battery packs) should not be a main consideration. And one would think that the I3's carbon fiber chassis should need a much smaller battery to equal or surpass the range of a Cybertruck, for example.
I can forgive price and range, because those are the sort of things that come with a company's first generation of EVs. But they didn't get anything else about it right. It's almost as though they were trying to have it fail so they could say "look, nobody wants EVs".
The newer versions look OK. But all of them are a little chrome heavy IMHO. It can look nice on larger cars, but because the bolt is so small, all the accents and flourishes seem jumbled together.
> What dumbass metric is causing these stupid decisions?
Sales and margin for the most part. The sales part, I imagine it's largely a failure of successfully marketing the vehicles, but I could be wrong.
The Volt to me was largely a failure of marketing at the time. Practically no normal people I know have any clue about what the Volt was. I went to a few dealerships to look at one and most salespeople didn't have a clue about the car (common though with car sales) or didn't even have any on hand to show. There was practically zero mindshare of GM equating with hybrids; the vast majority of car buyers I knew interested in hybrids essentially only knew/cared about Toyota. With declining sedan popularity in the US the writing was on the wall.
The Bolt was seen by many US car buyers as too small of a car and often confused for the several years older PHEV Volt. The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high. The people I talked to about the Bolt EUV figured it was just a different trim level of the same car, not realizing it was a good bit bigger.
Three different cars with different capabilities and yet so many people would just think they're the same V/Bolt thing GM talked about a decade or so ago.
> The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high.
Yes, this is / was a real issue and might be the biggest fuck-up for GM. I’m an EV nerd and when I talk about these cars I emphasize the first letter like I’m moderating a spelling bee…
Their CEO seems to be reacting to a perception that Chevy is “behind” and trying to get ahead of the market on EVs. If they were smart they’d still be making the Volt, since it’s an extremely reasonable PHEV that many people with garages in the US would appreciate. It would increase the number of electric miles driven.
I have a Volt and love it - it's the perfect car for someone like me with a 30 mi round trip commute. Partner recently got the plugin hybrid version of the BMW X5 (gets about 50 miles on electric), and so far we love that car, too.
Don't understand at all why GM doesn't make a PHEV SUV. They would be the perfect car for lots of people in the US.
Eh. If foreign carmakers want to compete in the US they can do what Toyota did and set up shop in the US. Employ Americans with market wages and under American labor standards.
We had a generation of globalism. It gutted the middle class.
Toyota did that because they saw the value of being in the US based on the then existing demand. Other manufacturers aren't getting that chance, and I'm not convinced those that banned 'em will be willing to let 'em manufacture here. Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
> Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
TikTok is a direct channel for Chinese propaganda into the western infosphere.
That is hardly "no stakes".
Yes, the same concerns should also get the other social media giants wings clipped. The EU should keep taking bites out of YouTube, Facebook, etc. too.
TikTok can set up shop in the West. Setting up shop in the West means you are subject to Western laws. We have seen China demonstrate over and over that it will not comply with that.
There is a huge difference in people employed here vs in China--the self-censorship, for one. China relies on the fact that social pressure causes self-censorship even without the intervention of the higher-ups. This is vastly less effective when all the employees are from the US.
Toyota set up shop in the US in 1981 because the US auto industry and unions lobbied for import restrictions. Then Congress held hearings and threatened legislation, followed by the UAW filing trade complaints.
Then, in the 1981, Japan signed the Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) agreement where they agreed to limit auto exports to the US to 1.68 million vehicles annually. [0]
The US is the second largest auto market in the world.
the irony is that apparently it was the one model where the sales were going up year over year, vs. the usual initial high demand and subsequent decline of ICE models
