The 2017 Chevy Bolt EV is the latest electric entry into the automotive world and a finalist for the 2017 Autoblog Tech of the Year awards.
TranscriptSEBASTIAN BLANCO: Hey, everyone. This is Sebastian Blanco with Autoblog and Autoblog Green. Welcome to the 2017 Autoblog Tech of the Year testing. Today we're going to take a look at the 2017 Chevy Bolt EV.
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The reason that the Bolt EV is in our testing this year is because it takes what we all see as coming down the road from the future of transportation and distills it into something that people can afford today. It's a 238-mile all-electric vehicle. It starts at a price of $37,495. But with electric vehicles, you get money back from the Fed. So for a lot of people, it should start at under $30,000.
What GM has really done here is tried to make the easiest introduction to EVs possible. Now, what I mean by that? Well, let's start with the range. The Chevy Bolt will be the first lower-priced electric vehicle with over 200 miles of range, which in this case is 238 miles. What 238 miles gets you is really no need to plug in at night sometimes. You have, like, a 20, 40-mile commute every day? You can go a couple of days, maybe plug in twice a week.
And then one of my favorite things that it has is driver selectable regeneration. There's a D for drive, as in a normal automatic transmission vehicle. There's also an L, like a lower gear, which is very useful if you want to do one-foot driving. So every time you take your foot off the accelerator, it instantly starts to slow you down. If you're in D mode, it coasts a little bit.
Even more impressive-- there's a little paddle on the back left side of the steering wheel, and if you take your foot off the accelerator and hold it down, it will bring you to a complete stop. That was all without putting any pressure on the brake pedal at all. What's interesting about the powertrain here is that when you take your foot off the accelerator or when you hit that pedal, it uses the regenerative braking. If you step on the brake pedal, that is all 100% friction breaks.
One of the benefits of that slow down just using pure acceleration, not having to go into blended mode at all-- it's a very smooth transition from movement to being stationary. And I think that's something we'll get more used to as more and more people drive electric vehicles.
There's a 10.2-inch touchscreen which is just very clean, very easy to use, and reacts the way that you might be used to from your smartphone. And it uses very simple graphical interface to tell you what's going on in the car, whether it's how much state of charge is left or how you did on driving. Because it teaches you as you go how to be a better driver and get even more range if that's what you want.
One of the things that might be surprising for a car that it's this small from the outside is that there's a lot of room inside. And GM has very carefully designed this car to give that effect. What GM has done here in the Chevy Bolt is really taken a lot of its learnings from its previous plug-in vehicles-- the Volt, the Cadillac ELR-- and made it ready for a whole bunch of new buyers.
And that shows up in the range with 238 miles and also the price at $37,495, which for most people will come down to a price of under $30,000 after federal tax credit. So this has a suite of things that are ready for people who never thought of these before to say, hey, I'm going to go check this out.
So that's the 2017 Chevy Bolt EV. For my money, this is the full package that helps define the future of transportation.
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