- The Chevy Bolt is such an uninspired electric car
that they brought the whole industry
and electric car's reputations back years,
is what I thought before I actually drove one.
It turns out it's pretty great.
What's that look?
(upbeat music)
Here we have the Chevy Bolt EUV,
so this is the slightly larger one.
And if you want to remain entirely anonymous
while you are on the road, buy this thing.
I have never gotten so few looks in a car before.
Like I swear, you could take an 11th gen Civic around,
and more people are gonna look at it than this thing.
Now first of all, the headlights, they suck.
So we have our DRLs right here.
These are your normal headlights.
They're better than like, you know,
standard non-LED headlights.
For LED headlights, they suck.
Don't buy this if there's a bunch of deer in your area.
(upbeat music)
To be clear, I think it's a fine-looking car,
it's just nothing special.
Also nothing special,
the charging rate, it's 54 kilowatts,
which is kind of just terrible
when you compare it to the other stuff in the market
like IONIQ 5 just 300.
The saving grace here though,
is that we only have a 65 kilowatt-hour battery,
which means at least you can charge it up fairly fast.
Even on a level two charger,
you can get a good bit of juice into this thing.
I really like their selection of tires on this.
First of all, 17-inch rims.
I think the black ones look pretty good.
And also, you get plenty of sidewalls.
So many EVs have these great big 20-inch rims,
and it rides like (mouth sputters).
Also nice, we have these energy-efficient Michelin tires,
which are great because for one, they give you more range.
And two, they are very quiet.
I was shocked at how quiet
this thing was going down the highway.
And then I realized like the other cars around me,
you can hear those, you just don't hear this thing.
Coming around the back,
there's enough trunk space sort of.
If you look in here,
you can fit your camera gear, a couple backpacks.
But the saving grace of this all,
is that down below the floor, you get heaps more room.
The viewer that we got this from actually said
if you put the seats down,
you can fit four winter tires side by side,
fits just about perfectly. (door thuds)
One thing I find rather annoying is this rear quarter panel.
They have this nice shwoopy-doopy here,
which, if that's for like occupant safety, shut up.
If it's for occupant safety reasons, fair enough.
But I think it's just because they thought
that this looked cool.
It makes checking your blind spots a lot harder
than it should be.
Also, every time that you walk away from it, it beeps.
That's really annoying as well.
The rear seats in the Bolt are just large enough for me.
Six feet tall.
I have about one finger between my head and the ceiling.
That said though, as long as you do fit, it's pretty great.
I have heaps of room for my legs.
And these seats are pretty darn comfortable.
You even have a little,
yeah, a couple of cup holders, very nice.
Oh, wow, I even have rear seat heating
and a couple of charging ports, fancy.
Popping into the Bolt EUV, oh.
First of all you get a very throaty introduction.
And also, there's enough room here
to fit a whole LTT water bottle in the side.
In here, it is a car.
The Chevy Bolt EUV does this amazing thing
that every single other electric car seems to stumble over.
It makes sense.
Oh, I wanna put it in drive.
Let's pull the drive thing. (car chiming)
I wanna change the climate,
let's just touch the climate controls.
The buttons feel nice and good.
That's something that the EQS
and Lucid Air were not able to do.
The infotainment, it just works.
It's very responsive.
Say that you want Apple CarPlay on your main screen, boom.
Just touch it, drag it over, totally reorganizable.
So the stuff that you actually want to use
is going to be in, you know, the easy spots to access it.
This is excellent.
Also, we have Android Auto, Apple CarPlay,
all of that great stuff.
It goes full screen,
and is probably one of the best implementations
that I've seen.
This being the premier package,
we do have these nice leather seats.
They have heating and cooling,
and all of the electronic adjustments that you expect.
Well, lumbars only in and out.
I do kind of wish it had up and down as well,
but they are comfortable to sit in.
They don't hold you in super good.
I do wish that there was a lot more bolstering,
but these are very clearly comfort-orientated seats,
not sporty.
Before we set off, piano black,
hate to see it all over around here.
All over up here.
We just microfibered it,
so it doesn't look too bad right now.
But in a day, it will once again.
- [Andy] Stop making them, carmakers.
- Yeah, stop doing it. Let's drive.
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All right, let's do it.
(upbeat music)
The Chevy Bolt EUV is surprisingly fun to drive.
As long as you turn off traction control,
you can still get that nice, you know, EV push just like...
It's not particularly quick.
This thing has 200 horsepower,
zero to 60 of, I think, 6.8 seconds.
It's faster than your nan's,
whatever your nan drives probably.
But like we're going onto the highway right here.
I'm gonna pin it.
Yeah, so once you're above about 40, 50 kilometers per hour,
the like, psh, electric hit kind of goes away.
That said, a lot of the people that drive this
probably don't care about how fast it goes
when you're, you know, already at 120 kilometers per hour
'cause they're just not even gonna bother driving it then.
So this has Super Cruise, and this is a Super Cruise road.
Super Cruise is GM's take on autopilot.
Now, it works by mapping the roads,
and it works shockingly well.
Like we're just ripping down here right now,
and I have no qualms like talking with my hands.
I would not do this in a Tesla.
I am just looking at the camera.
I am hardly looking in front of us, and it is totally fine.
This is coupled with the adaptive cruise in this
being some of the best that I've ever experienced
up there with the likes of Audi and Toyota.
Good job, GM.
As far as a car that allows you to, on the highway,
just chop through the miles,
this is really high up there for me.
The Michelin tires, as I mentioned before,
are nice and quiet.
Suspension is surprisingly comfortable.
This one's only 3,600 pounds, which is pretty heavy,
but that also is like 1,500 pounds lighter
than the vast majority of EVs out there,
which means that they don't have to get, you know,
super aggressive with the damping settings.
They can just let it, you know,
be set up pretty much like a normal car
how you would expect.
Super Cruise does have the large problem
that it only works on the Super Cruise verified roads
like the ones that they have gone ahead and mapped.
So if Super Cruise is good or not for you,
is totally dependent on,
do you have Super Cruise on your daily commute?
If you don't have Super Cruise in your area,
don't buy it, obviously.
It's like two and a half grand.
Totally not worth it if you're not gonna use it.
That said, in Canada, all of the Trans-Canada's mapped.
A lot of random other little highways are mapped.
And a lot of the US is mapped as well,
so there's a pretty good chance
that your commute does have Super Cruise enabled.
And if it does, I strongly recommend it.
That's the first time I think I've ever enjoyed
self-driving before.
Like look, (car chiming)
oh, Super Cruise is done.
That's it for this highway. I'm driving now.
Okay, this might be our only good corner here.
Sport mode, traction control off.
This thing corners shockingly well,
and also it (indistinct) the tires a little bit,
probably is an LSD,
but suspension in this thing is shockingly well set up.
Like you can just huck it into a corner.
The turning is surprisingly good for something like this.
On corner exit, you know, the tires sort of run out of grip.
But I feel like if you put some PS4s on this thing,
you could go to the autocross and just embarrass some people
in cars that, well, you know,
would be incredibly embarrassed
to get shredded by a Bolt EUV.
It's amazing what having so much less weight
an electric car will do for you.
I guess while we're driving along here,
should we have a listen to the sound system, Andy?
- [Andy] "Crab Rave"!
- Play "Crab Rave."
- [Music Player] "Crab Rave" by Noisestorm, sure.
Playing on Spotify.
- In this version of the Bolt EUV,
we have the Bose sound system
which has some of the most comical bass
I have ever heard in a car before.
Let's look here.
I landed on minus six,
minus seven for the bass.
I'm just gonna put it back to zero here.
(upbeat music)
(groans) Sam, our labs engineer went ahead and tested this,
and it is hilarious.
At 40 hertz, this thing has plus 12 decibels
at, you know, zero on this screen.
It is terrible sounding, it's just boomy.
All that you hear is (mouth sputters).
When you turn it all the way down to minus 12,
that is what we consider, that like hits our target curve.
And our target curve has plus 10 dB in the bass range.
Also making things a little bit worse,
the tweeters aren't pointed at you,
they're pointed directly in.
The treble in the sound stage is fine here,
but when you move forward, there's way better imaging
when your head's like above the infotainment
because of the way the tweeters are pointed.
That said though, a lot of this can be fixed
by just simply turning it down.
I like about negative seven 'cause I'm a bass head.
A lot of people are gonna like it at minus 12.
That just fixes most of it.
The boominess goes away and it's very good,
like it's quite a good sound system,
for like a $50,000 Canadian car.
Another thing that's really good about this car
is the range.
So you get almost 400 kilometers of range,
which given that it's only a 65 kilowatt-hour battery,
is incredibly good.
This thing just sips electricity as you drive down the road.
So excellent job there, Chevy.
(upbeat music)
So the Chevy Bolt EUV,
on one hand this car makes me incredibly excited
about the future of cars.
'Cause like, even though it's not the most exciting
compared to like other crossovers,
this thing is freaking dramatic like, go here, ho, ho!
Compared to like a slushbox or a CVT,
this transmission and power train
is just so, so, so much better!
And it just makes driving a car like this a lot more fun
than it currently would be if you get
like a Chevy Trax or whatever.
At the same time, for 50,000 Canadian dollars,
this right here, I think,
is the best $35,000 car
for $50,000.
I really like this.
Like as far as just a simple commuter
that takes you where you want to go, it's very comfortable,
it's nice and quiet.
It's peppy enough
that you can have a little bit of fun every now and then.
Like you don't feel like you're just dreading driving it.
The problem is, is that for, well, the same amount of money,
you can get the base Hyundai IONIQ 5.
And the starting version of this thing right here,
which is 40 grand Canadian,
does not come with adaptive cruise,
which in my mind, it's a no-go
for a car that's that expensive.
You can get a Civic for what?
Like $15,000 less that has adaptive cruise.
I guess the real thought is,
how much do you care about if your car is cool or not?
You know those like dads,
Andy? - Yeah.
- They almost take pride
in the practicality of their decisions.
This is one of those cars
that you can rationalize very practically
being like it's quiet, it's very comfortable.
Well, it uses no gas.
So if you have cheap electricity
and you have very expensive gas like we do in BC here,
it could be very, very practical.
But at the same time, like I said,
you're so close in price to the IONIQ 5,
it's pretty hard to give this thing a recommendation.
What it does do though,
is make me incredibly excited to try out the LYRIQ.
That's coming soon.
And as long as Chevy's able to keep
the sense-making bits of the Bolt,
and turn it, you know, as well
into like the nice, full EV experience,
I think that's gonna be fantastic.
So hit like, get subscribed,
and let me know what you think of the Chevy Bolt.
Too boring.
Kind of cool.
I think a lot of people would really like this,
like my dad would probably really like this car.
But at the same time, like, God, it's boring. (laughs)