Lol Very true! “A Chevy Bolt is, um a Chevy Bolt.” 😂. I do love my 2023 Chevy Bolt 2LT. It does exactly what I need it to do. I pick kids up from school almost everyday, 20 miles round trip. I work nights so I drive in between 180-200 miles every evening 5 nights per week. So far I have personally put 45,000 miles on this little beast in 9 months! 0 issues!
the Bolt fit many peoples use case very well. if you really need a lot of capability, a 2 ev household might be the answer. Bolt and something that does great on the 10% challenge EV6 maybe or similar.
The biggest issue really is the low pack voltage with the 85 kWh battery. I bought an Ariya over the Equinox EV for that one reason alone. As someone who travels off the beaten path, I'm often at dealership charging that's limited to 125 amps. On a longer charging session, I'll save maybe 20 minutes or more with the Nissan compared with a low voltage GM product
0 to 100% is just a comparison chart. Real life is very different. I just drove 1500 miles from Denver Colorado to Atlanta Georgia one week ago. Not a Blazer but the similar 2025 Equinox EV. Temps were between 20 and 45 degrees for the entire trip and altitude changes from 8500 feet to 1000 feet so not the greatest conditions. The longest leg of my trip was 169 miles between charges. My Equinox EV’s lowest state of charge was 18% and highest was 80%. Longest charge was at a EV GO/Ultium charger that never got above 75 kWh and took 24 minutes. I mostly stopped at Tesla Superchargers that had consistently higher power from 155 to 90 kWh and no charge lasted more than 20 minutes. My drive time ended up being 2 hours longer than my comparable ICE car that gets around 26 MPG and about the same price for charging as gas. The Equinox EV is super comfortable to road trip and even though it was my first time to even use a fast charger, all of the info from the Out Of Spec UA-camrs really helped my trip be flawless.
Before buying a 24 AWD Blazer I owned a Mini Cooper SE EV with only 113 mile range. I never fast charged it, all my charging was at home . I don't see any problems with charging with my use.
I do well with my Bolt, I occasionally make a longer trips and charge ten to twenty minutes once or twice, during the trip. The charging curve on the Blazer would work great for me, we don't all race cross country regularly like out of spec dose.
The Blazer EV's biggest setback isn't the charging but rather the efficiency. It's a big, heavy car. As you noted, it's also not a direct competitor with the EV6, ID.4, Ioniq 5, Model Y, etc., and the platform is really designed around a 100 kWh battery. The direct competitor for those other vehicles is actually the Equinox EV, which -- thanks to its efficiency -- is more directly comparable to those other EVs. Also, I would characterize the charging for these 85 kWh Ultium packs as "deceptively not bad." Funny enough, they are decently designed for your 10% challenge because they don't start to slow their charging at all until after 10 minutes, and even with the poor efficiency of the AWD Blazer EV, it would get close to 85 miles in that test. Thanks to FWD Equinox EV's efficiency, it would likely see 100 miles or more. It does look like they do the best starting around 20% battery, though, where even the AWD Blazer EV might add 100 miles of range (when driving at 80 mph) in about 15 minutes. So they are absolutely reasonable road trippers for the average driver.
@shethjones4494 The Mach-E is definitely closer to the Blazer EV in terms of size. Those two might be the only EVs in their class. Also, the charging performance between the two is probably pretty similar at this point, with a couple subtle differences (e.g., a bottom buffer on the Mach-E, a more finished charging profile, a "boost" factor, etc.).
@@ryankassel5691the 0-100% test is interesting for science, but the 10-80% is relevant for buyers. Might be worth throwing the two sessions in together as the divergence for each car may yield some very useful results.
Another nice stats video, Ryan. This is also my favorite page with my favorite 2 charts/graphs, and it's the one I've been wondering when it would be updated to include vehicles like the more efficient 2024 Highland Model 3 (both the AWD and RWD versions) that have had range tests already done. Or are they missing charging tests? Or even an updated charging curve graph for the new Ioniq 6 rather than using the old graph of the curve for 2021 Kia EV6 AWD for it. Their curves have changed quite a bit the last 3 years. The Ioniq 6 recently competed on a 70mph range test with the Highland Model 3. And I forget, was Cathy's 2024 Model Y tested?
Hopefully you can get a FWD Blazer EV (312 mile EPA) soon to compare efficiency. I drive 340 miles roundtrip to work in my Blazer EV RS. In ideal conditions it takes only 13 minutes of charging each way to get that done if I leave home at least at 95%.
I wish the cell temp data was available. I heard GM locked it down but curious to know if that's is actually the case. Someone should do a test with the AC off.
How about the Honda prologue, it's the same vehicle and should be cross shopped. Or a used q8 e-tron? BTW. Love these videos on the charge curve. So does the charge curve hold from any SOC, or is there a boost at the beginning no matter the SOC?
4:53 I would definitely pushback on the idea that a 0% to 100% is representative of real-world expectations. In this case, it is the theoretical worst case for the Blazer EV, but the theoretical maximum would actually be much closer to what the average Blazer EV driver would experience. It would be one thing if all EV charging curves behaved the same way, regardless of the battery percentage when the charge session started; however, they don't. Combine that with the fact that most average drivers will rarely arrive at a charger with less than 20% and even fewer will arrive with 10% battery or less, a 0% starting point paints a very unrealistic picture of what people should expect. With GM EVs in particular, it would be very dangerous to encourage people to try to arrive at such low SoC simply because GM's EVs are not designed with a bottom battery buffer. Even EVs that do have a bottom buffer can be very inconsistent, resulting in people getting stranded because they hoped to "dip into the buffer" in order to make it to a charger. On my end, I'm encouraging GM/Honda (formerly Ultium) EV drivers to plan around or target a ~15% arrival. Even starting at 80%, that's a minimum 2.5 to 3 hours of freeway driving before the first stop, and a 15 to 25 minute charging stop will get them back on the road with another 2+ hours of freeway driving range (150 to 200 miles). Within those parameters, that chart would look very different. In fact, that chart would be more interesting and useful if you kept the list of vehicles, but logged a 0%, 10%, and 20% starting points to show how each vehicle is affected by the choice of when to plug in.
I’d love to do the tests starting from multiple states of charge but unfortunately we can’t put that many miles on test fleet vehicles. The 10% challenge should at least partly cover that, but we weren’t able to do the test for the blazer
most people with EVs have L2 charging at home. I pay 12c/kwh. Filling my EV9 from 0-100 costs 12 bucks for 350 mile in town range, 300 highway. When I"m road tripping its more expensive but if you average it, its still cheaper than gas for people who drive a lot. Energy costs money, there's no way around it. The only way to make an all electric economy work is grid scale renewables. Remember that a 100 square mile solar farm in the southwest would power the entire united states. Maybe half that with integrated energy storage.
It seems like this car is good for trips up to 600 miles or so. If you want to go cross country it may be pretty annoying dealing with that charging curve. So, it's good for 99% of the trips most people make.
Local and regional travel would be it's sweet spot I would think unless you have time on your hands as the time adds up at those charging stops. I also saw with The Average EV channel that they are very temp sensitive. Winter temps they seem to be charging better than they did during the summer. The charging is all over the map and isn't very consistent at all.
The DC charger tests are important but context is too. My Acura ZDX has the Lyriq charging curve. Not the best at all. BUT how are you using your car? A 250 mile round trip doesn't need DC charging for this car. So if you are regularly driving 400 miles, the curve is important. If one occasionally needs DC charging it is a different story. Be realistic about how you use your EV. The ZDX does nothing perfectly, but does everything very well.
Low voltage battery, needs 500a to get the rated speed so it will need to be on a 350kw charger. These things will need to be blocking the 350kw chargers just to get 150kw. GM must fix this charging curve and it is a bad combination of voltage and amperage. I saw The Average EV doing the charging tests on the Equinox and I think Tom also tried this where on a 150kw charger it actually isn't that much slower and the charge curve appears to change and smooth out, but it doesn't get anywhere close to its rated KW speeds. It is pretty disappointing. GM will be competing on price at some point to keep these moving. Fine for local or regional travel where you might only need to make one or two stops. If you have a longer trip where the stops stack up then this vehicle and the Equinox are going to be slowing you down compared to other vehicles in the market. People buying the Honda version of this car probably don't know anything about most of this and bought the name plate.
Most people do not road trip often. Those are facts. We seem to like to pretend otherwise but most folks are not going to dcfc often if they have home charging
@shethjones4494 People buy cars with the expectation they can road trip them. Even if it is just for the holidays once or twice each year or for a vacation. That said the expectations need to be set up front what the charging situation is like and how long it is going to take. People should know that for local travel and commute you charge at home(hopefully) and will never have to deal with this. If you are doing a regional road trip say within a 500 mile radius of home then expect a couple of charging stops and and an expectation of how long those stops are going to be. So roughly 35 minutes a stop, add an hour and 10 minutes ish to the drive depending on the time of year, charger availability, temps etc. However if you plan longer trips than this the charge stops add up and fast. Before long you have added a lot of time to the trip. To downplay the role of the road trip in the equation will leave people pretty dis-satisfied if they don't understand how these specific vehicle charge. The GM Ultium cars are not charging very well. They are taking more time to charge, appear to be very sensitive to temps, and they do want a lot of amps to see the peak charge rates. The newbie to EVs won't understand all of that so the dealers and people online sharing need to put it all out there and hope the consumer takes their time to absorb it all. If they marketed these cars as "city cars" no one will buy them. The person buying them with the expectation of road tripping across the US are likely not going to be very happy. Inform those who are considering buying these EVs and let them make up their own mind. An extra 10-15 minutes per stop may not sound like much until you are out on the road and having to make multiple stops. That time adds up pretty fast. I tell people go to a better route planner and select the vehicle, select a starting point and a destination that is regional, and then do it with something that is longer distance. Then change the vehicles and keep re-running the plan. Find out how long you will be driving and charging. See how much faster or slower you will get to your destination. Charging speed does matter if you have to road trip. If you never road trip you can buy anything you want. I drove a Gen 1 Nissan Leaf for a lot of years as my local city commuter car and it was great. Worked for 95% of my driving. For the rest of it I had an ICE for my 3 or 4 road trips I would take a year. That works fine too. I went into the Leaf with that expectation. Someone buying a Blazer or Equinox I don't believe are going into the deal with that expectation. LOL
Blazer and GM in general is basically mediocre. But, EGMP basically is a cobalt rich battery to get those good charging speeds. Which also makes the battery and the cars more expensive. If I had to replace my Niro, the Equinox would be the top choice due to not having to worry about if it has a heat pump since it is standard. It has more range and charges 2x faster. Slower though lol.
Let's be honest: 99% of EV users will charge their EVs at home for 99% of the cases (because it's almost always cheaper and because public EV charging is still not widely and reliably available), from a Level 2 charger, which will be fully utilized. So this model will be more than "usable" for vast majority of owners.
Yeah. I’ve had an EV couple of years now and have used a DC fast charger precisely zero times so far. It’s been 100% AC charged at home and at relatives’ houses.
Until they go on a road trip and are clogging a high power chargers for a lot longer than most other EVs on the road. We need to point out automakers laziness when making a poor vehicle.
@@nicholaskolnik6458 Well, this is GM's strategy to slow down the adoption after crushing all their EV1's and actually selling the technology to big oil Chevron/Texaco. Tesla foiled that big oil plan back then by refusing to sell out, and it's foiling it again by opening up their vast network to all manufacturers, and they install way too many stalls per site for GM's plan to have any effect.
I don't know really how I feel about this. I guess the takeaway really should just be not to discharge to 0%. I don't know why anyone wouldn't just try to start charging at 10% to get a better curve.
If people are taking care of their battery pack they will try to keep it in the 20-80% meaty center of the pack. OOS pushes these things hard, but if you go digging into the research and data on how to care for these batteries it is in the middle of the pack. The bottom line is the voltage is too low on Equinix and Blazer forcing you to use a 350kw charger to get the 500a it needs to get the max charge speed, but then it will thermally derate. If you use a 150kw charger it won't reach the max speed, but it also does not appear to derate and at the end of the charge there are only a few minutes separating them. They just are not very good charging vehicles at this stage. Maybe GM can tweak that charging curve. I guess time will tell.
No, 0-80% is not real world experience. Who’s out there driving on a road trip or even charging at home and depleting their batteries to 0% before charging? Only vehicle testers do that.
You guys need a standardized meter to quantify "Worst Charging" "Ok Charging" "Poor Charging". You guys use so many words instead of numbers to describe a vehicles charging speeds. Just say this car charges at X miles per minuet on average between 10% and 80%. Then it becomes easy to compare charging between vehicles.
Except "miles" of range is so subjective it's almost unusable. Vehicle A might use 50% more kWh of electricity to travel the same distance as vehicle B, while vehicle C might estimate more miles than both while actually delivering a fraction of that. It might be adding more of those "estimated miles" per minute, but how accurate is that estimate? What speed will those miles be driven at? How efficient is that vehicle? Is it cold out? How much elevation? How many people in the car? Are you towing? is it wet? etc. I think comparing the "area under the curve", as shown in the video, is the only accurate way of comparing.
@@bfvader All I am saying is that using words like "Worst Charging" or "Poor Charging" or "Ok Charging" is not the way to describe how well or how bad a vehicle charges they need to come up with a standardized scale because to these guys anything that doesn't charge at 350KW is bad charging. Do a grade scale, give the vehicle A charging if it holds 200KW for x amount of time and B charging if it holds 150KW for x amount of time C charging if it holds 100 KW for x amount of time but just stop with the arbitrary words to describe the charging. They love charging so much come up with a standard and get manufactures to meet the standard.
@@darinbrazil5496 It definitely does need to be broken down better. I like the letter grade scale, but it varies so much based on state of charge. Maybe break the pack up into five 20% chunks and give each chunk a grade. My EV6 would get the following grade under your scale: 0-20% - A 20-40% - A 40-60% - A 60-80% - B 80-100% - C- Or they could do a better job of explaining C-Rate and someone buying a car would know that an EV6 does 3.1C while the Bolt does 0.9C (though peak speeds at peak voltage don't tell the whole story either)
@@bfvader I am just thinking for the average consumer watching these videos , They are only going to see "Worst Charging" and never think anything else of it. I like the scale you are saying but even just a more general 10% to 80% charging grade scale for the average person would be better than just labeling cars as bad or worst or poor charging vehicles.
$55 bucks and I have to wait half an hour or more? What the heck? Have you noticed the recent price hikes at these superchargers? They’re basically the same as filling up a gas tank, and yet, no one seems to be complaining about the rising prices. Instead, all the talk is about the speed of charging. But let’s not forget about the real issue here - the prices! We need to have a serious discussion about this, folks. It’s getting out of hand.
Most EV owners just plug in their EVs when they get home and unplug when they leave and just don't worry about fast charging prices since you use it so infrequently
All of the Ultium vehicles overheat and have terrible charge curves, including the Lyriq. We had ours lemoned because it was so bad. They false advertise with their advertised charge speeds/times.
Lol Very true! “A Chevy Bolt is, um a Chevy Bolt.” 😂. I do love my 2023 Chevy Bolt 2LT. It does exactly what I need it to do. I pick kids up from school almost everyday, 20 miles round trip. I work nights so I drive in between 180-200 miles every evening 5 nights per week. So far I have personally put 45,000 miles on this little beast in 9 months! 0 issues!
the Bolt fit many peoples use case very well. if you really need a lot of capability, a 2 ev household might be the answer. Bolt and something that does great on the 10% challenge EV6 maybe or similar.
The biggest issue really is the low pack voltage with the 85 kWh battery. I bought an Ariya over the Equinox EV for that one reason alone. As someone who travels off the beaten path, I'm often at dealership charging that's limited to 125 amps. On a longer charging session, I'll save maybe 20 minutes or more with the Nissan compared with a low voltage GM product
Supercharger access really helps, as the Supercharger support high current since most Tesla vehicles are 400V native.
0 to 100% is just a comparison chart. Real life is very different. I just drove 1500 miles from Denver Colorado to Atlanta Georgia one week ago. Not a Blazer but the similar 2025 Equinox EV. Temps were between 20 and 45 degrees for the entire trip and altitude changes from 8500 feet to 1000 feet so not the greatest conditions. The longest leg of my trip was 169 miles between charges. My Equinox EV’s lowest state of charge was 18% and highest was 80%. Longest charge was at a EV GO/Ultium charger that never got above 75 kWh and took 24 minutes. I mostly stopped at Tesla Superchargers that had consistently higher power from 155 to 90 kWh and no charge lasted more than 20 minutes. My drive time ended up being 2 hours longer than my comparable ICE car that gets around 26 MPG and about the same price for charging as gas. The Equinox EV is super comfortable to road trip and even though it was my first time to even use a fast charger, all of the info from the Out Of Spec UA-camrs really helped my trip be flawless.
Before buying a 24 AWD Blazer I owned a Mini Cooper SE EV with only 113 mile range. I never fast charged it, all my charging was at home . I don't see any problems with charging with my use.
I do well with my Bolt, I occasionally make a longer trips and charge ten to twenty minutes once or twice, during the trip. The charging curve on the Blazer would work great for me, we don't all race cross country regularly like out of spec dose.
The Blazer EV's biggest setback isn't the charging but rather the efficiency. It's a big, heavy car. As you noted, it's also not a direct competitor with the EV6, ID.4, Ioniq 5, Model Y, etc., and the platform is really designed around a 100 kWh battery. The direct competitor for those other vehicles is actually the Equinox EV, which -- thanks to its efficiency -- is more directly comparable to those other EVs.
Also, I would characterize the charging for these 85 kWh Ultium packs as "deceptively not bad." Funny enough, they are decently designed for your 10% challenge because they don't start to slow their charging at all until after 10 minutes, and even with the poor efficiency of the AWD Blazer EV, it would get close to 85 miles in that test. Thanks to FWD Equinox EV's efficiency, it would likely see 100 miles or more. It does look like they do the best starting around 20% battery, though, where even the AWD Blazer EV might add 100 miles of range (when driving at 80 mph) in about 15 minutes.
So they are absolutely reasonable road trippers for the average driver.
I’m looking forward to getting some more Chevy EVs in sometime
I love how no one mentions mach e when talking about competitors and charging performance.
@shethjones4494 The Mach-E is definitely closer to the Blazer EV in terms of size. Those two might be the only EVs in their class. Also, the charging performance between the two is probably pretty similar at this point, with a couple subtle differences (e.g., a bottom buffer on the Mach-E, a more finished charging profile, a "boost" factor, etc.).
@@ryankassel5691the 0-100% test is interesting for science, but the 10-80% is relevant for buyers. Might be worth throwing the two sessions in together as the divergence for each car may yield some very useful results.
@@newscoulomb3705I'd be really curious how the 2024 Mach-E curve looks for 10-80% vs the Blazer's.
Another nice stats video, Ryan. This is also my favorite page with my favorite 2 charts/graphs, and it's the one I've been wondering when it would be updated to include vehicles like the more efficient 2024 Highland Model 3 (both the AWD and RWD versions) that have had range tests already done. Or are they missing charging tests?
Or even an updated charging curve graph for the new Ioniq 6 rather than using the old graph of the curve for 2021 Kia EV6 AWD for it. Their curves have changed quite a bit the last 3 years. The Ioniq 6 recently competed on a 70mph range test with the Highland Model 3.
And I forget, was Cathy's 2024 Model Y tested?
We don’t have charging curves on them yet but we will soon!
@ryankassel5691 Thanks, Ryan. Good to know.
Not a road warrior EV but perfectly serviceable for 300-500 mile journeys.
Hopefully you can get a FWD Blazer EV (312 mile EPA) soon to compare efficiency.
I drive 340 miles roundtrip to work in my Blazer EV RS. In ideal conditions it takes only 13 minutes of charging each way to get that done if I leave home at least at 95%.
That’s quite the commute!
You ran the AC during the charging test presumably? That may cause the big thermal throttling you saw vs Tom’s test.
I wish the cell temp data was available. I heard GM locked it down but curious to know if that's is actually the case. Someone should do a test with the AC off.
How about the Honda prologue, it's the same vehicle and should be cross shopped. Or a used q8 e-tron? BTW. Love these videos on the charge curve. So does the charge curve hold from any SOC, or is there a boost at the beginning no matter the SOC?
Prologue is a competitor WITH apple CarPlay/android auto! It does have a boost profile, it should be ~10 minutes of boost
Love the data 🤓 thanks Ryan
4:53 I would definitely pushback on the idea that a 0% to 100% is representative of real-world expectations. In this case, it is the theoretical worst case for the Blazer EV, but the theoretical maximum would actually be much closer to what the average Blazer EV driver would experience.
It would be one thing if all EV charging curves behaved the same way, regardless of the battery percentage when the charge session started; however, they don't. Combine that with the fact that most average drivers will rarely arrive at a charger with less than 20% and even fewer will arrive with 10% battery or less, a 0% starting point paints a very unrealistic picture of what people should expect.
With GM EVs in particular, it would be very dangerous to encourage people to try to arrive at such low SoC simply because GM's EVs are not designed with a bottom battery buffer. Even EVs that do have a bottom buffer can be very inconsistent, resulting in people getting stranded because they hoped to "dip into the buffer" in order to make it to a charger.
On my end, I'm encouraging GM/Honda (formerly Ultium) EV drivers to plan around or target a ~15% arrival. Even starting at 80%, that's a minimum 2.5 to 3 hours of freeway driving before the first stop, and a 15 to 25 minute charging stop will get them back on the road with another 2+ hours of freeway driving range (150 to 200 miles). Within those parameters, that chart would look very different.
In fact, that chart would be more interesting and useful if you kept the list of vehicles, but logged a 0%, 10%, and 20% starting points to show how each vehicle is affected by the choice of when to plug in.
I’d love to do the tests starting from multiple states of charge but unfortunately we can’t put that many miles on test fleet vehicles. The 10% challenge should at least partly cover that, but we weren’t able to do the test for the blazer
Exactly
Love to see what the RWD RS with the larger battery can do.
$56 for less than 340 miles... I thought this was supposed to be cheaper than gas? Am i missing something here?
most people with EVs have L2 charging at home. I pay 12c/kwh. Filling my EV9 from 0-100 costs 12 bucks for 350 mile in town range, 300 highway. When I"m road tripping its more expensive but if you average it, its still cheaper than gas for people who drive a lot. Energy costs money, there's no way around it. The only way to make an all electric economy work is grid scale renewables. Remember that a 100 square mile solar farm in the southwest would power the entire united states. Maybe half that with integrated energy storage.
It seems like this car is good for trips up to 600 miles or so. If you want to go cross country it may be pretty annoying dealing with that charging curve. So, it's good for 99% of the trips most people make.
Local and regional travel would be it's sweet spot I would think unless you have time on your hands as the time adds up at those charging stops. I also saw with The Average EV channel that they are very temp sensitive. Winter temps they seem to be charging better than they did during the summer. The charging is all over the map and isn't very consistent at all.
Exactly. These people are obsessed with dcfc times
The Chevy bolt which is...... the Chevy bolt 😂. To be honest, I'm actually still considering it since I don't road trip much.
It’s a great deal, especially with the incentives! Honestly it’s a really great car as long as you don’t need to go too far
@@newdawnalex I loved that. 😂 What else needs to be said about the Bolt? Charging speeds from 2011.
Blazer RS RWD or SS AWD. Both have the larger pack and have slightly higher pack voltage like Lyriq and ZDX.
The DC charger tests are important but context is too. My Acura ZDX has the Lyriq charging curve. Not the best at all. BUT how are you using your car? A 250 mile round trip doesn't need DC charging for this car.
So if you are regularly driving 400 miles, the curve is important. If one occasionally needs DC charging it is a different story. Be realistic about how you use your EV. The ZDX does nothing perfectly, but does everything very well.
Low voltage battery, needs 500a to get the rated speed so it will need to be on a 350kw charger. These things will need to be blocking the 350kw chargers just to get 150kw. GM must fix this charging curve and it is a bad combination of voltage and amperage. I saw The Average EV doing the charging tests on the Equinox and I think Tom also tried this where on a 150kw charger it actually isn't that much slower and the charge curve appears to change and smooth out, but it doesn't get anywhere close to its rated KW speeds. It is pretty disappointing. GM will be competing on price at some point to keep these moving. Fine for local or regional travel where you might only need to make one or two stops. If you have a longer trip where the stops stack up then this vehicle and the Equinox are going to be slowing you down compared to other vehicles in the market. People buying the Honda version of this car probably don't know anything about most of this and bought the name plate.
Most people do not road trip often. Those are facts. We seem to like to pretend otherwise but most folks are not going to dcfc often if they have home charging
@shethjones4494 People buy cars with the expectation they can road trip them. Even if it is just for the holidays once or twice each year or for a vacation. That said the expectations need to be set up front what the charging situation is like and how long it is going to take. People should know that for local travel and commute you charge at home(hopefully) and will never have to deal with this. If you are doing a regional road trip say within a 500 mile radius of home then expect a couple of charging stops and and an expectation of how long those stops are going to be. So roughly 35 minutes a stop, add an hour and 10 minutes ish to the drive depending on the time of year, charger availability, temps etc. However if you plan longer trips than this the charge stops add up and fast. Before long you have added a lot of time to the trip.
To downplay the role of the road trip in the equation will leave people pretty dis-satisfied if they don't understand how these specific vehicle charge. The GM Ultium cars are not charging very well. They are taking more time to charge, appear to be very sensitive to temps, and they do want a lot of amps to see the peak charge rates. The newbie to EVs won't understand all of that so the dealers and people online sharing need to put it all out there and hope the consumer takes their time to absorb it all.
If they marketed these cars as "city cars" no one will buy them. The person buying them with the expectation of road tripping across the US are likely not going to be very happy. Inform those who are considering buying these EVs and let them make up their own mind. An extra 10-15 minutes per stop may not sound like much until you are out on the road and having to make multiple stops. That time adds up pretty fast. I tell people go to a better route planner and select the vehicle, select a starting point and a destination that is regional, and then do it with something that is longer distance. Then change the vehicles and keep re-running the plan. Find out how long you will be driving and charging. See how much faster or slower you will get to your destination. Charging speed does matter if you have to road trip.
If you never road trip you can buy anything you want. I drove a Gen 1 Nissan Leaf for a lot of years as my local city commuter car and it was great. Worked for 95% of my driving. For the rest of it I had an ICE for my 3 or 4 road trips I would take a year. That works fine too. I went into the Leaf with that expectation. Someone buying a Blazer or Equinox I don't believe are going into the deal with that expectation. LOL
Blazer and GM in general is basically mediocre. But, EGMP basically is a cobalt rich battery to get those good charging speeds. Which also makes the battery and the cars more expensive.
If I had to replace my Niro, the Equinox would be the top choice due to not having to worry about if it has a heat pump since it is standard. It has more range and charges 2x faster. Slower though lol.
Let's be honest: 99% of EV users will charge their EVs at home for 99% of the cases (because it's almost always cheaper and because public EV charging is still not widely and reliably available), from a Level 2 charger, which will be fully utilized. So this model will be more than "usable" for vast majority of owners.
Exactly
Yeah. I’ve had an EV couple of years now and have used a DC fast charger precisely zero times so far. It’s been 100% AC charged at home and at relatives’ houses.
Until they go on a road trip and are clogging a high power chargers for a lot longer than most other EVs on the road. We need to point out automakers laziness when making a poor vehicle.
@@nicholaskolnik6458 Well, this is GM's strategy to slow down the adoption after crushing all their EV1's and actually selling the technology to big oil Chevron/Texaco.
Tesla foiled that big oil plan back then by refusing to sell out, and it's foiling it again by opening up their vast network to all manufacturers, and they install way too many stalls per site for GM's plan to have any effect.
Minority here. I have no home charging, I DC charge about 90% of the time. About once a week.
Woooo Ryan!
I don't know really how I feel about this. I guess the takeaway really should just be not to discharge to 0%. I don't know why anyone wouldn't just try to start charging at 10% to get a better curve.
If people are taking care of their battery pack they will try to keep it in the 20-80% meaty center of the pack. OOS pushes these things hard, but if you go digging into the research and data on how to care for these batteries it is in the middle of the pack. The bottom line is the voltage is too low on Equinix and Blazer forcing you to use a 350kw charger to get the 500a it needs to get the max charge speed, but then it will thermally derate. If you use a 150kw charger it won't reach the max speed, but it also does not appear to derate and at the end of the charge there are only a few minutes separating them. They just are not very good charging vehicles at this stage. Maybe GM can tweak that charging curve. I guess time will tell.
No, 0-80% is not real world experience. Who’s out there driving on a road trip or even charging at home and depleting their batteries to 0% before charging? Only vehicle testers do that.
You guys need a standardized meter to quantify "Worst Charging" "Ok Charging" "Poor Charging". You guys use so many words instead of numbers to describe a vehicles charging speeds. Just say this car charges at X miles per minuet on average between 10% and 80%. Then it becomes easy to compare charging between vehicles.
Except "miles" of range is so subjective it's almost unusable. Vehicle A might use 50% more kWh of electricity to travel the same distance as vehicle B, while vehicle C might estimate more miles than both while actually delivering a fraction of that. It might be adding more of those "estimated miles" per minute, but how accurate is that estimate? What speed will those miles be driven at? How efficient is that vehicle? Is it cold out? How much elevation? How many people in the car? Are you towing? is it wet? etc.
I think comparing the "area under the curve", as shown in the video, is the only accurate way of comparing.
@@bfvader All I am saying is that using words like "Worst Charging" or "Poor Charging" or "Ok Charging" is not the way to describe how well or how bad a vehicle charges they need to come up with a standardized scale because to these guys anything that doesn't charge at 350KW is bad charging. Do a grade scale, give the vehicle A charging if it holds 200KW for x amount of time and B charging if it holds 150KW for x amount of time C charging if it holds 100 KW for x amount of time but just stop with the arbitrary words to describe the charging. They love charging so much come up with a standard and get manufactures to meet the standard.
@@darinbrazil5496 It definitely does need to be broken down better. I like the letter grade scale, but it varies so much based on state of charge. Maybe break the pack up into five 20% chunks and give each chunk a grade.
My EV6 would get the following grade under your scale:
0-20% - A
20-40% - A
40-60% - A
60-80% - B
80-100% - C-
Or they could do a better job of explaining C-Rate and someone buying a car would know that an EV6 does 3.1C while the Bolt does 0.9C (though peak speeds at peak voltage don't tell the whole story either)
@@bfvader I am just thinking for the average consumer watching these videos , They are only going to see "Worst Charging" and never think anything else of it. I like the scale you are saying but even just a more general 10% to 80% charging grade scale for the average person would be better than just labeling cars as bad or worst or poor charging vehicles.
interesting!
Idk. I feel that anything at this point is better than ID4 charging wise lol
$55 bucks and I have to wait half an hour or more? What the heck? Have you noticed the recent price hikes at these superchargers? They’re basically the same as filling up a gas tank, and yet, no one seems to be complaining about the rising prices. Instead, all the talk is about the speed of charging. But let’s not forget about the real issue here - the prices! We need to have a serious discussion about this, folks. It’s getting out of hand.
Most EV owners just plug in their EVs when they get home and unplug when they leave and just don't worry about fast charging prices since you use it so infrequently
@@TAWithiam I hear you, and it’s frustrating when companies increase prices without adequate feedback.
@@ChargeToDrive absolutely, hopefully we eventually have competition and prices are driven down
Yeah ok Tesla guy!!
All of the Ultium vehicles overheat and have terrible charge curves, including the Lyriq. We had ours lemoned because it was so bad. They false advertise with their advertised charge speeds/times.
That isn't true. There are tests out there showing 35 minute 10 to 80 charges.. Also GM doesn't advertise 10 to 80% times
Not very useful. Nothing new
This just shows how bad gm Evs are
Does it?