GM Bolt (Opel Ampera-E) Review.

Impressive.

240 miles !

http://www.greencarreports.com/news

bk

A very good preview by The Verge here too:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12899752/chevy-bolt-driving-impressions-review

They did 238 miles and the car claimed it had another 38 miles left. So potentially 276 miles!! That is Dublin to Cork with no difficuly. In fact it would almost be good enough for Cork to Belfast!!

Ah I'd say 200-230 miles.

Still far better than the 130 kms max 24 Kwh Leaf though in fairness it meets 99% of my needs, 47,500 kms since January 2015, hardly small mileage. Yes I have a work charge point, it does help a lot but we do need a lot more fast chargers, having said that if you had 200-240 miles range then trips to fast chargers would be rare.

irishgrover

Impressive... An EV that I could genuinely consider for my 110 mile commute......

cros13

Deleted User wrote: »

Ah I'd say 200-230 miles.

Still far better than the 130 kms max 24 Kwh Leaf though in fairness it meets 99% of my needs, 47,500 kms since January 2015, hardly small mileage. Yes I have a work charge point, it does help a lot but we do need a lot more fast chargers, having said that if you had 200-240 miles range then trips to fast chargers would be rare.

You sound like you might be trying to talk yourself out of something.

Nothing to talk out of, it won't be available here any time soon. !

bk

Deleted User wrote: »

Ah I'd say 200-230 miles.

Yup, but that is still Cork to Dublin at motorway speeds without needing to stop, perfect!

I wouldn't mind stopping for 20 minutes for a coffee and topup on a 4 hour trip to Killarney *

I think 3 hours of driving is an important tipping point. In my experience you can easily and comfortably do Dublin to Cork without stopping in 2 hours 30 minutes in a Diesel. So having to add at least an hour to an hour and a half to such a trip if you do it regularly, turning a 2:30 trip into a 4 hour trip is nonsense IMO.

At about 3 hours I find you need to start thinking about stopping, stretching the legs, use the toilet and have a coffee. If you can get another hours worth of range in that 20 minutes you are looking really good IMO. You aren't doing anything different from what a normal ICE driver is doing and that is very important for mass market acceptance IMO.

* Strictly speaking Dublin to Killarney is less then 200 miles, so you could even do that trip without stopping. Though realistically my bladder/legs would probably give out on a 4 hour journey before the battery would! Which kind of proves my point.

It is these sort of 200 mile EV's which will make owning an EV effortless and largely no different then an ICE car and help propel them into the mainstream.

So all we need to do now is bombard Opel Ireland with emails requesting, no, demanding they import the Ampera-E to Ireland !!! Current stand is that they will not and instead "continue to offer efficient diesels to the Irish market" or something like this in a e-mail I got......

Shame they limited it to 50 Kw DC charging, I'm pretty damn sure a 60 Kwh battery can take more than this !

cros13

OK... so that's the end of that.

Vauxhall UK just confirmed there will be no RHD Bolt due to fundamental platform issues.
They actually strike a tone of being quote upset about it.

No issues, they want to sell as little as possible for now.

Could be more down to the supply of batteries by LG Chem.

The reason they designed the car in the first place was to say to tesla that GM got a 200 mile affordable EV before them, nothing more. GM have shown their utter contempt for electrics back in 2001 when they destroyed all the EV1's.

I'd say that by 2019 they may perhaps sell the Bold in Ireland depending in interest and general worldwide interest. If they think it can make money they will sell it.

bk

I suspect battery manufacturing capacity will be the limitation. If they sell out of all the ones manufactured in the US, then no point in putting in the engineering effort to switch over to a RHD for now.

I still wish they would bring the Volt to Ireland, seems like another great EV.

cros13

Well the current Volt isn't available in RHD either....

cros13

Looking forward at LG factory build-out plans, I don't see GM being able to make much more than 50,000 Bolts a year until maybe 2019. Maybe could hit 80,000 if they take every single additional cell LG Chem produces worldwide for the next three years.

It's plain as day now to see why Tesla is building the gigafactory. I think LG is also going to face an issue with market availability of cobalt. A lot of their chemistry seems to use more Co than Panasonic's, at least based on the 18650s they're shipping out.