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.
Which is my concern. In the middle of nowhere where I’m at we regularly go to that city with a charger 100 miles away. It’s where hardware stores, furniture stores, cheaper groceries, clothing stores and pretty much anything else you can’t buy at a gas station are. If we go in the winter, unless we go to the mall where the charger is and deliberately walk around every. Single. Time. We won’t have the range to go to that city and drive to every store we would usually go to.
Yeah, I’ve been living in an urban area long enough to forget what that’s like. Certainly it’s tougher where things are spread out more.