I have owned a gen 1 Volt for 10 years this month. Excellent drivetrain in an okay body. A few software glitches, some not awesome decisions about battery pack physical monolithic construction and "refuse to move" threshold criteria values.
However, GM really messed up by not putting Voltec in a wide variety of chassis styles from say 2015 until now. Spread the R and D costs across more units, get more election fueled miles going for local driving but still allow the use of gasoline on road trips until the public charging infrastructure got going, etc. A double strength AWD Voltec in a Colorado and/or Silverado sized truck would have sold every copy they made. Instead, GM left it to some pretty poorly run 3rd party upfitters to experiment with this with disastrous results (I'm looking at you, Via Motors).
GM engineers can do some great work when they are allowed to, but I'm still not convinced the C and VP level officers aren't botching the / won't further botch the pivot to EVs. Take the Bolt refresh, a very small number of parts charges would have allowed that thing to DC fast charge charge at industry competitive speeds, but to save a few hundred bucks per unit they're having to discount them by thousands. I hope I'm wrong about that and GM figures it out before they get completely obsoleted by Tesla, Rivian, Chinese brands, etc.
However, GM really messed up by not putting Voltec in a wide variety of chassis styles from say 2015 until now. Spread the R and D costs across more units, get more election fueled miles going for local driving but still allow the use of gasoline on road trips until the public charging infrastructure got going, etc. A double strength AWD Voltec in a Colorado and/or Silverado sized truck would have sold every copy they made. Instead, GM left it to some pretty poorly run 3rd party upfitters to experiment with this with disastrous results (I'm looking at you, Via Motors).
GM engineers can do some great work when they are allowed to, but I'm still not convinced the C and VP level officers aren't botching the / won't further botch the pivot to EVs. Take the Bolt refresh, a very small number of parts charges would have allowed that thing to DC fast charge charge at industry competitive speeds, but to save a few hundred bucks per unit they're having to discount them by thousands. I hope I'm wrong about that and GM figures it out before they get completely obsoleted by Tesla, Rivian, Chinese brands, etc.