New Chevy Bolt on the way, GM's Barra says

The Chevrolet Bolt isn't going away after all.

During a second-quarter earnings call Tuesday, General Motors Co. CEO Mary Barra announced the coming of a next-generation Bolt — a lower-priced electric vehicle that GM previously planned to stop producing later this year.

“Our customers love today’s Bolt. It has been delivering record sales and some of the highest customer satisfaction and loyalty scores in the industry,” Barra said in a statement. “It’s also an important source of conquest sales for the company and for Chevrolet.”

GM has sold more than 33,000 Bolt EVs and the larger EUVs through the first half of 2023.

“We will keep the momentum going by delivering a new Bolt," Barra added. "And we will execute it more quickly compared to an all-new program with significantly lower engineering expense and capital investment by updating the vehicle with Ultium and Ultifi technologies and by applying our ‘winning with simplicity’ discipline.”

Stephanie Brinley, an associate director at S&P Global Mobility, said it's a "sound decision to bring the name back" and offer another affordable electric option. The 2023 Bolt EV starts at $27,495 and the Bolt EUV starts at $28,795. GM is also planning to offer an electrified version of the Equinox at a base price of about $30,000.

"It's not really a surprise that GM wants to have another EV in that space," Brinley said. "To announce it now is like 'hey, like everybody likes this product right now, let's make sure that they know it's going to continue.'"

The news comes after Barra told investors during first-quarter earnings that the company would end production of the smaller EV to prep the Orion Assembly plant in Lake Orion where it's built for production of new electric trucks.

More:GM to stop making electric Chevrolet Bolts at the end of this year

GM's investing $4 billion at Orion Assembly to build electric trucks, which are based on the company's new electric platform, Ultium. The current Bolt is not based on the Ultium platform.

Barra told investors on a Tuesday morning call that GM will call the new Bolt an "Ultium-based product, so we are definitely leveraging that technology because that's going to really help us get cost down."

GM delivered the first Bolts in late 2016 with a national rollout in 2017. The automaker added the larger EUV in 2021. In 2021, the automaker had to recall all Bolts for battery fire risk as the result of manufacturing defects. After working through the recall, GM dropped the Bolt's prices and aimed to achieve record sales of the electric car.

In a release about the coming Bolt, the automaker said using Ultium and the new Ultifi software platform will help bring the Bolt back to market at a faster pace.

Timing, production site, and other details about the next-generation Bolt will be announced later.

The Bolt will join Chevrolet’s growing lineup of all-electric vehicles, including the Silverado EV, Blazer EV and Equinox EV, which are all launching this year.

khall@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @bykaleahall