Might We Replace Our Ten Year-Old Prius with a Chevy Bolt Next Year?
If continued battery-cost savings are passed on to purchasers, fast charging blooms, rules tighten, and EV tax credits emerge that provide preference for EVs over PHEVs, then the Bolt wins; if not, PHEVs do, as they will still be in the sweet spot. Battery costs, networks, and politics—not horsepower—decide the speed of the EV transition over the next decade…
Perhaps a straw in the wind that the EV transition will continue, at at least a moderate pace:
Andrew Hawkins: The 2027 Chevy Bolt will be one of the cheapest EVs you can get <https://www.theverge.com/news/797646/chevy-bolt-price-reveal-ev-affordable-specs>: ‘The new Bolt will start under $30,000, which should make it a welcome addition to the stubbornly expensive EV market in the US…. When it rolls off the assembly line at GM’s factory in Fairfax, Kansas, early next year, the Bolt will start at $29,990… followed by the RS trim for about $32,000, both including destination fees…. A 65kWh LFP battery that will enable an estimated 255 miles of range… recharge from 10-80 percent in 26 minutes. And it will have bidirectional, vehicle-to-home charging capabilities, allowing it to supply up to 9.6kW of power…
On the one hand, very nice to see them trying this.
On the other hand the Toyota Prius Prime and the Kia Niro PHEVs start at $35,000, and are somewhat nicer inside. The Bolt’s value proposition is price and simplicity: Expect simpler EV maintenance, more hard plastics, a functional but less premium design, infrastructure range anxiety, plus GM’s no‑phone‑mirroring stance hat makes your infotainment spartan as well.
In a world with substantial tax credits for an EV but not for a PHEV, it seems to me that the Chevy Bolt would have a very good chance of becoming an American standard over the next decade. But we are not in that world, are we?
Looking forward over the next five years, it seems to me that PHEV are likely to remain the sweet spot. To bet that the Bolt will become the sweet spot requires that you believe:
Regulatory pressure will intensify at the state and federal level in spite of the ravings of chaos-monkey Donald Trump.
Fast charging gets easy everywhere—you get rapid expansion of NACS/Supercharger access and networks like GM–Pilot/EVgo expanding across states, so pure EVs lose the road‑trip time penalty and daily charging becomes routine.
Battery tech and costs keep falling rapidly, and those cost improvements are immediately incorporated in vehicle prices, so that the price gap widens further given the PHEV cost of lugging around dual powertrains.
The maintenance cost savings of EVs turn out to be very real, both in financial and in hassle cost.
The Bolt wins if you expect to see, quickly: cheaper, denser batteries, ubiquitous fast charging, and stricter emissions rules. The Prius Prime and company win if you expect charging to stay patchy and gas engines to remain convenient and cheap.
Reference:
Hawkins, Andrew J. “The 2027 Chevy Bolt Will Be One of the Cheapest EVs You Can Get.” The Verge. October 9. <https://www.theverge.com/news/797646/chevy-bolt-price-reveal-ev-affordable-specs>.