General Motors’ shift from an internal combustion engine-producing company to one that makes electric motors is sputtering. EV sales are up, but growing slower than expected. The company’s next-generation Ultium platform, in particular, isn’t meeting expectations. GM’s new electric trucks and SUVs seem perennially delayed — or full of buggy software.
I think I have an easy solution to a lot of these problems: bring back the Chevy Volt.
Remember the Volt, GM’s scrappy Toyota Prius fighter from the mid-2010s? The company was lauded when it first came out in 2010 as a prescient bet on vehicles with electric powertrains. And it was undeniably a very good hybrid. The first-generation model got 36 miles of electric range before the gas kicked in, while later versions would get a whopping 53 miles of electric range.
If you get a EV that has 200 or so miles of range and having a home L2 charger is a game changer, you don’t need public charges only on a road trip. Let’s take the Kia EV6 will go from 18% to 80 percent around twenty minutes, so when you plug in on a fast DC charger you’re pretty close to 200 or so miles into the road trip. You’ll only need two 20 minute charges for 400 miles. That’s not a big deal however a Chevy Bolt would take a hour and 20 min from twenty percent to eighty percent so a Chevy bolt isn’t an attractive road trip car but a great City car.