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The Chevy Blazer EV Launch Has Gone from Rough to Worse as GM Issues Stop-Sale
- mlinhares 3y agoSometimes it’s hard to believe this is just incompetence.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoN'ah. Big auto execs are really that incompetent, they don't need to go out if their way to intentionally fuck up something. They should dogfood their own products more often instead of being chauffered in Porsches or Aston Martins (I imagine).
- superduty 3y agoYou imagine wrong, at least in the case of Ford’s execs. The burden of corrupt and useless unions and the ancient dealership model are direct contributors to the garbage the big 3 put out. Stifled product and manufacturing innovation, build costs out of control, quality disincentivized, and the ever present spectre of easy Democrat $$bailouts work against designing or building or delivering anything good at a reasonable cost.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoHaving worked pretty directly with multiple OEMs, I can't say I've seen many issues caused caused by whatever political axe you have to grind. I've lost count of the number of times I saw executives make decisions that had obvious negative repercussions. Things like not paying critical suppliers to get leverage in negotiations, then being surprised when production can't run.
- panick21_ 3y agoThe Union and the dealerships are not the reason for these issues.
- Zigurd 3y agoDealerships kind of are
- philwelch 3y agoMost businesses will go bankrupt and cease to exist if they are run incompetently. In GM’s case, this almost happened during the GFC but the federal government nationalized it before eventually restructuring it and selling it back to private shareholders. You see, GM—and GM’s supply chain—is “too big to fail” (and accounts for a lot of jobs in Midwestern swing states).
- mlinhares 3y agoNo large company went out of business for good during the GFC, the government bail outs covered most of the ones that would matter in an election.
- philwelch 3y agoI don't know about that; I would consider Washington Mutual a "large company" (although perhaps not one that would matter in an election).
- havaloc 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPDA7dMOT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPDA7dMOT4
- orenlindsey 3y agoThis is why nobody likes American car brands. The brands that make them cut corners and things like this happen. Teslas are the only American-made cars that are somewhat high-quality.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Tesla >High quality Pick one.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoTheir software quality is best in class, rivaled only by other EV-only brands like Polestar and Rivian. The traditional manufacturers cannot compare at all.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSure but you can't remotely OTA update chassis cracks or badly fitting body panels. For better or worse, bad SW can always be fixed later. Bad manufacturing can not, and software won't get you from A to B on its own.
- bigbillheck 3y agoI'd rather have bad software and wheels that don't fall off than the other way 'round.
- iancmceachern 3y agoTotally. Every so often the Bluetooth connection on my Scuon FR-S disconnects. I just turn the car off and back on, because its a stick it's easy and I can even do it while driving. No biggie. Other than that it's been super reliable. The perfect car.
- mulmen 3y ago> I just turn the car off and back on, because its a stick it's easy and I can even do it while driving. Please stop doing this. You don’t need Bluetooth to safely operate your car. You do need power steering and brakes.
- cyberax 3y agoIt's especially hilarious because their official reason for their shitty infotaiment system was "safety".
- ethbr1 3y agoWow, the Edmunds article has a list of the 23 issues the dealership flagged when they brought the car in: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2024-chevy-blazer-ev-long-term-faults.html https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2024-chevy-blazer-ev-long-t... (at bottom of article) It sounds like one or more hardware manufacturing defects and/or full software crashes triggered under normal vehicle operation. Which sounds like QA was compressed / skipped to hit a launch date. Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 3y ago>> Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later" I knew someone who worked at GM in OTA (over the air updates) and I said not to let them use that capability to slip schedules and fix it later. She said there were definitely teams wanting to use it that way, but she was pushing back. That was several years ago. Maybe they lost that battle.
- ivraatiems 3y agoShould've just kept selling the Bolt. You know, the immensely popular, cheap, established vehicle brand they've been making for years? Oh well.
- 7thaccount 3y agoYeah right? What was the reason?
- ethbr1 3y agoAlmost certainly: profit margins on different models. - Bolt: -$4k to -$9k per vehicle [0] - Suburban: +$10k per vehicle [1] [0] https://www.hotcars.com/gm-admits-bolt-not-profitable/ https://www.hotcars.com/gm-admits-bolt-not-profitable/ [1] https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/06/heres-how-much-profit-gm-makes-on-full-size-trucks-and-suvs/ https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/06/heres-how-much-profit-g...
- ivraatiems 3y agoThis is correct, I believe: Chevy never made the kind of money they wanted to on the Bolt, despite its popularity.
- jevogel 3y agoIt solely exists for CAFE. Make money with trucks, boost fleet mileage with a low-end EV.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe politics of established ICE execs vs the EV execs and Tesla margin envy.
- claytongulick 3y agoOr the Volt. That's the one I really wanted. 50 miles electric, extended range gas at over 40mpg.
- 3y ago
- a_vanderbilt 3y agoNo CarPlay and reliability issues have doomed this car out of the gate. Incompetent management will throw their hands up and say "We tried!", ignoring all of the reasons why it failed. It's an electric vehicle, provide reliable electronics (you already figured this out in your gas-powered vehicles) and a decent infotainment system and people will love it. Tesla managed to dominate the market doing little else besides making it fast.
- nradov 3y agoWell Tesla doesn't support CarPlay either. Apparently a lot of consumers don't care much.
- a_vanderbilt 3y agoWhich is why I said decent infotainment. CarPlay became the solution to manufacturers producing garbage head units for a decade. Tesla's isn't bad, which is why you don't hear people deem it a dealbreaker nearly as often.
- cyberax 3y agoTesla had exclusive access to the only real charging network in the US. It used to beat the inconvenience of their craptacular infotainment system. I've been using Teslas for 10 years, and my next car will likely be Lucid Air when they switch to NACS.
- j33zusjuice 3y agoIt’s cool, we’ll just bail them out again when they tank the company with shit products.
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943 - Dec 2023 (85 comments) Our Chevy Blazer EV Has 23 Problems After Only 2 Months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749417 - Dec 2023 (48 comments)
- to11mtm 3y agoOuch. Kinda follows the trend I'm hearing with carmakers of late however. Just yesterday my BIL was opining that his dad was 'thinking about a Chevy' after being a F150 driver for decades (home improvement type industry.) I warned him that a colleague had a Blazer in the shop for 3 months waiting on a part... i.e. every manufacturer seems to be strugglebussing with meeting ship dates while keeping quality and proper service supply chains in place. I do think a big challenge is 'overplanning'; Ford did some things right with the Maverick and F150 Lightning (i.e. using as much as what they had on hand in a way to minimize overall risk) but did make some missteps along the way (General supply allocation for the Maverick, poor handling of parts supply chain for known CSPs and other warranty repairs, build quality of some early models being bad enough to somehow lead to wet floormats.) If you're gonna go out knowing things may have issues, you must have a plan to make it right for the consumer in an orderly fashion. The increasing levels of abstraction/bureaucracy in warranty and defect handling in products over the last 20 years is frankly sad.
- ethbr1 3y agoIf I'm in the place where I still need a truck, and there's a decent used extended warranty option, the Lightning extended-range battery is my current next vehicle to beat. Backfeeding home power in the event of an outage or running essentially everything in an off-grid scenario is too game changing to ignore.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe F150 hybrid has been able to do this for a few years. It wasn’t new technology developed specifically for the Lightning. So in that sense it’s not surprising that it works well on the Lightning.
- scrapcode 3y agoA common reply to "how is it working at X?" is that it is only as good as your immediate supervisor. I think this is the same with vehicle brands, except that your experience owning them is only as good as your nearest dealership/maintenance garage. I have had a terrible experience with almost all brands at some point. Most recently, Ford completely refusing to acknowledge widespread issues with their 10-speed transmission- to the point many Ford dealerships in the area quit taking transmission service work completely. I quit fighting them and switched to a Chevy, and I'll just have to wait until it malfunctions to see how bad the nearest service department is.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoShame - it's quite a sharp looking design.
- alphabettsy 3y agoI don’t think this is surprising to anyone who’s been into cars for any length of time. GM isn’t generally known for quality. Chassis tuning lately and the LS engines is about it.
- daft_pink 3y agoRemember when they told Bolt owners to park more than 50 feet away from other vehicles due to the risk of fire? I really wanted to rent one on Turo and create a youtube video where I pulled into some small business' parking lot and coned off all the spaces in the lot, because apparently it's not safe to park next to a Chevy Bolt. GM is so outrageous. They should have let them go bankrupt.
- facialwipe 3y agoWhy do I have the feeling that the Kia boys are about to become the Chevy boys…
- belZaah 3y agoTo me, this sounds like a good old Conway's law. The EV fundamentally changes the architecture of the car: what it's made of, what's the role of each component is and how these are interlinked. In particular, there's a shift from mechanical coponents to software components. This would imply, that the structure of the organization designing the car should also change in fundamental ways. But in absence of an enterprise architect (as in "a person responsible for the architecture of the entire enterprise"), it can be tricky to synchronize organizational change with engineering change due to separation of responsibilities. Also, interaction of physical components is rather straightforward to determine (separate teams for the battery and motors is obvious) whereas software components are intangible.