Chevrolet Bolt EV production to be discontinued later this year

General Motors Company has announced that it will end the production of its Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle later this year as its shifts its zero-emission efforts to trucks and SUVs that will be built on a new battery platform. The US automaker sold a total of 38,120 Bolt EV units in the year 2022, up from 24,828 units sold in 2011. A total of 19,700 units of the EV were sold in the first three months of the year.

Bolt is the automaker's first mass market EV and still accounts for more than 90% of all of its EV sales in the US. The Bolt EV was preceded by the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that GM ended production of in 2019. In the late 1990s, GM built and leased about 1,100 EV1 cars. "We have progressed so far that it's now time to plan to end the Chevrolet Bolt EV and EU production, which will happen at the very end of the year," GM CEO Mary Barra told investors.

The Bolt EV starts at $26,500 and qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit, and thus has been repeatedly touted by the Biden administration as an example of an affordable EV. However, in January last year, GM vowed to invest $4 billion in its Orion Township Assembly plant that builds the Bolt EV to produce Chevrolet Silverado EV and electric GMC Sierra using the company's next-gen Ultium EV platform.

The company aims for its Detroit-Hamtramck and Orion plants to be able to build more than 600,000 electric trucks a year by late 2024. The OEM expects to build 400,000 EVs in North America from 2022 through mid-2024 and increase its capacity to one million units annually in North America in 2025.

In August of 2021, GM had announced a $2-billion recall campaign that it expanded to cover all of the 140,000 Bolt vehicles it had produced due to battery fire risks. The recall prompted GM to halt Bolt production and sales for more than six months.