Chevrolet Bolt – cheapest electric car in the US – bows out to make way for Hummer EV

It turns out buyers in the US don’t want a cheap electric hatchback as much as they want a hulking battery-powered pick-up.

One of the cheapest and most efficient electric cars manufactured and sold in the US – the Chevrolet Bolt hatchback, which costs from $US26,500 – will go out of production after just five years to make way for a battery-powered Hummer EV and other full-size pick-ups and SUVs.

US car giant General Motors has announced the Chevrolet Bolt will reach the end of the line by the end of this year.

It will make way for an increase in production of full-size electric pick-ups and SUVs from General Motors brands such as Chevrolet, GMC and Hummer.

A US transportation policy expert, David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in Massachusetts USA, criticised GM’s decision to favour more profitable electric vehicles over more efficient ones.

Killing off the Chevrolet Bolt to make way for more Hummer EVs was “a step backward for road safety, emissions mitigation, and EV affordability” and “widens inequities and slows electrification (of the vehicle fleet),” the expert wrote on Twitter, adding it would keep electric vehicles “out of reach for all but affluent Americans”.

The axe fell on the Chevrolet Bolt even though sales had been increasing, reporting 38,000 examples as sold last year alone and accounting for nine out of 10 electric cars sold by General Motors.

The Chevrolet Bolt was introduced almost 20 years after General Motors manufactured a total of about 1100 examples of its original EV1 vehicles – the subject of the documentary movie Who Killed The Electric Car? – in the late 1990s.

However, despite the relative success of the Chevrolet Bolt, General Motors says it aims to manufacture more than 600,000 full-size pick-ups and SUVs with electric power from the same Detroit facility from next year – and is on track to produce 400,000 vehicles this year.

By 2025, the biggest car-maker in the US says, it hopes to build more than 1 million full-size electric pick-ups and SUVs.

The post Chevrolet Bolt – cheapest electric car in the US – bows out to make way for Hummer EV appeared first on Drive.