What will it take to make you seriously consider an EV?

I'm very curious how much EV sales will plummet with a $7,500 price increase across the board. It could be brutal considering how many sales were pulled forward to Q3.

 

Fun (for some) low cost free updates.

 

Here in Canada, the EV tax credit was discontinued at the beginning of the year. EV sales have declined quite dramatically. I think sales have actually declined every month this year. I think year over year sales in the Summer were down 30%.

I'd expect something similar in the US (maybe even a bigger decline as the US EV credit was quite a bit bigger than the Canadian EV credit).

 

Tesla's new in-car tron advertisement is pretty well done. I am surprised they have not leaned a little more into themed updates like this.

That said, I can see how some people would not like this.

 

Texas TERP EV credit is open again. It's first come first serve grant for purchase of new alternative fuel vehicles.

New EVs purchased 9/1/2025 or later qualifies for $2,500. There are only 2,000 grants available, so expect it to run out very quickly.

https://www.tceq.texas.gov/airquality/terp/ldplip

 

Rebooting the 2027 Chevy Bolt Was More Complex Than You’d Think

How complicated can it really be to restart production of an electric car, especially when the 2027 Chevrolet Bolt appears very similar to the Bolt EUV that was last built three years ago? In the case of Chevy's rebooted electric hatchback, it's more complicated than you might think. While the steel remains the same, the car's electrical architecture is almost entirely new.

Bolt chief engineer Jeremy Short spoke exclusively with Car and Driver after the car was shown to current Bolt owners last week at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. He said the hardest single part of the project was changing every electrical component on the vehicle while tooling from the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan was being reinstalled at a different GM plant in Fairfax, Kansas. That made rapid design changes more challenging, since development prototypes weren't yet coming off the lines as new features were finalized.

In April 2023, GM announced the Bolt would end production; the last "old" Bolt was built in December that year. But pressure from not just Bolt owners and fans, but GM executives who drove and liked the Bolt, led the company to reverse course by July 2023. Pre-production 2027 Bolts are now coming off the lines at Fairfax, and customer deliveries will start in January.

GM's First Iron-Phosphate Battery
By the end of its run in 2023, the battery in the outgoing Bolt was ancient. It used cells from GM's cell partner, LG Energy Systems, with a design and chemistry introduced in 2017 and slightly upgraded in 2020. It was obvious the new Bolt would need a modern battery. But as the company's least expensive EV, it would have to cost as little as possible. That led GM to adopt lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cells, becoming its first North American EV to use them. They come from a Chinese supplier, and the company will likely swallow significant import penalties until its own LFP cells come off the line at its Spring Hill, Tennessee, cell plant in late 2027.

LFP has 20 to 30 percent lower energy density than nickel-manganese-cobalt-aluminium cells, but it's significantly less costly. Evolution in LFP chemistries since 2017 meant the 2027 Bolt battery contains 65 kWh of energy and still offers equivalent range. The 2022 Bolt EUV was EPA-rated at 247 miles; Chevy projects the 2027 Bolt at 255 miles.

In keeping with the need to retain the old Bolt's structure, however, the enclosure for those new cells had to occupy the same volume and use the same attachment points as the superseded case. It's different inside, Short said, due to the different cell size, module layout, and wiring and communications for the updated pack. But it's the same size.

Biggest Surprise? Reliable Faster Charging
The maximum charging rate is 150 kilowatts, essentially a three-fold improvement on the old car's 55-kW rate. The goal was a 10-to-80 percent charge time of half an hour; the final time (under ideal circumstances) is estimated to be 26 minutes. That charge time stayed consistent during a 12,000-mile trip in four new Bolts from Detroit to Los Angeles, over 117 charges at nine different charging networks. Short called reliable 26-minute charging times his biggest surprise during development, and he believes that will make the new Bolt a better road-trip car than its predecessor.

The 2027 Bolt is also the first Chevy EV to come standard with Tesla's proprietary NACS charging port; the company will sell adapters to use common Level 2 and CCS fast-charging plugs when owners can't recharge at Tesla Superchargers. Plug and Charge software allows the owner to plug in and walk away, with session validation and payment taking place on the back end.

All-New Electric Everything
"Everything electrical is new" on the 2027 Bolt versus its predecessor, Short said, from switches and wires to control modules and high-voltage components. The old Bolt's "Global A" architecture was state-of-the-art for 2017, but every current EV the company makes now uses some version of its "Global B" architecture.

Advantages of Global B include five times the processor power, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, improvements to cybersecurity, and more advanced safety features like rear cross-traffic alert and automatic braking. With a specific GM Home Energy charging station, the 2027 Bolt can export energy to power a home during a blackout, known as Vehicle-to-Home (V2H). The new architecture also enables the latest version of GM's well-reviewed Super Cruise hands-free adaptive cruise control, now including automatic lane changing.

For GM's accountants, the most important part of Global B may be what Short called "new and exciting apps and features." The automaker is counting on monthly fees for some of those features and the cellular connectivity to keep them working, to add new, incremental revenue to its bottom line. To reinforce that, for North America, Chevy aligned the Bolt with the rest of its EVs by removing phone mirroring: no more Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. It's a controversial move, but Short insists, “Everything we get in [Android Auto] we provide, but with better integration to the vehicle."

Borrowing from the Equinox EV
For both the electrical architecture and the powertrain, many components were taken wholesale from the larger Chevrolet Equinox EV. That compact electric SUV has sold well since it finally hit the market in May 2024, and using its high-volume components further cuts GM's costs.

The 2027 Bolt's front wheels are powered by the same X76 integrated motor and electronics unit used in the Equinox. In the Bolt, it's rated at 210 horsepower, a 10-hp boost over the 2023 motor. But torque is substantially reduced from 266 to 169 pound-feet—a result of the different power characteristics of its LFP cells.

Vehicle integration control modules were carried over wholesale too. The Equinox and Bolt share the same sensor suite, though they had to be positioned differently in the shorter, blunter Bolt to provide the same 360-degree surround view. With its extra standard equipment, an updated Bolt LT weighs roughly 100 pounds more than the outgoing EUV; the last one we tested weighed 3779 pounds.

When it goes on sale early next year, the 2027 Chevrolet Bolt LT will start at $29,990, but a $28,995 1LT trim with fewer features will follow later in 2026. And while the car has mildly revised front and rear styling, you're forgiven if you look at it, think Bolt, and don't realize that it's a revised model. (Note that Chevy has dumped the previous model's "EV" suffix; it's just Bolt now.) Still, it's important to note that while Chevy's affordable electric hatchback looks pretty much the same as before, what's underneath is totally different.

 

I pulled the Quarterly sales numbers for 2024 and for the first three Quarters of 2025.

I massaged those numbers to try and get a decent grasp on what to project for the Fourth Quarter of 2025 and the First Quarter of 2026.

If you like, I can work up a post with several different scenarios, but there will be a fair amount of guessing involved. Also, I used the sales numbers for the entire company rather than digging for sales numbers specific to the USA.

 

Surprise surprise, even with safety drivers holding onto a killswitch, Tesla robotaxi is still more dangerous than Waymo. How's the robotaxi rollout going? We still gonna have a nationwide rollout by the end of the year right? That's what Elon said.

Tesla ‘Robotaxis’ keep crashing despite ‘safety monitors’

https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing-despite-safety-monitors/

 

Sounds like we all should be shorting Tesla stock. I should have taken your sage advice last month

 

Bro Robotaxi pump is done.

Now he has moved onto the next hype product. Optimus.

 

Sounds like you're proud of owning the most overvalued company in the world.

 

During the Tesla Q3 earnings call, CEO Elon Musk revealed that the company’s robotaxi service could begin operating without the safety monitors that currently ride in the front seat of all the autonomous vehicles’ trips within the next few months.

This move would make the vehicles fully driverless, which was one of the goals of the service from the very beginning, according to Musk.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/au...i-service-will-go-unmanned-in-the-near-future

 

He also added today they expect to have 500 robotaxis in Austin and 1,000 in California by year end.
If/when the safety monitors are removed, they can almost instantly flood the market.

Considering the Austin robotaxi map grew again recently and is quite large now, I doubt they go driverless in the entire zone by year end. I'm also curious if drivers will be pulled for rides that include highways by year end.

 

I never thought I would buy bottled water until I did, I never thought I would order food from a ride share until I did........................and no F`n way I am getting in a driverless car...................NEVER......................until maybe I do Seriously though, I would not support anything Elon does so it's a hard pass for me, Elon is evil and I will not contribute to his craziness

 

gift link, no paywall

Ford Considers Scrapping Electric Version of F-150 Truck
Once hyped as a ‘smartphone that can tow,’ production of the money-losing EV pickup may be shut down for good

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/...4?st=M2Q3rw&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

 

That's partly of their own making, as they touted a rock-bottom price for a bare-bones version when it was first promoted and released, then you couldn't find one for under $80k. They went after the higher-end instead of making it an example of Model-T affordability like they initially said. It all turned a lot of people off. And also, EV trucks just can't tow like gas rigs. They can pull more weight, sure. But they can't do it for very long and pulling up to a commercial charger with a trailer in tow is a pain. I'm a big EV guy, but I also have a 2010 Tundra for long trips and hauling/towing stuff.

They would have been much better off had they started with a full EV version of the Maverick and marketed it to commuters and urban homeowners who occasionally need to haul some boards or take an old dishwasher to the dump. If there was an EV Maverick, I'd buy it and use the Tundra even less.

 

Yup.
I would definitely get an EV Maverick.

 

In Ford's defense, there is no use in offering a lower cost F-150 Lightening to increase sales volume unless they were committed to scaling up said volume. At ~2,500 units per month, they were obviously not serious about producing at scale. Why? They lost $28K per unit on EVs this last quarter (the profit margin was -78%; Q3 2024 was -105%).

Ford's EV business has been dead from the very beginning.

 

My car has about 176,000 miles on it, and I'll probably start looking for a new car sometime next year'ish once it crosses 200k. The more I see the EV landscape in the US, the more I think I'll be going hybrid or regular ol' ICE. This mess is too unpredictable.