The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the new “EUV” version of the 2022 Chevy Bolt will travel an average of 247 miles on a full battery pack — three miles shy of the estimate General Motors provided when the vehicle was announced in February. The updated version of the existing Bolt, meanwhile, will top out at 259 miles, which is exactly what GM had predicted.
The EUV (which stands for “electric utility vehicle”) is basically a Bolt with a more traditional compact SUV shape. It’s about six inches longer and slightly roomier than the standard Bolt, and as such it weighs nearly 100 pounds more. That it can make fewer miles on the same 65kWh battery pack is not surprising, but it’s helpful to finally have an EPA rating in order to benchmark it against the competition.
Those ratings are for city and highway driving combined. The EPA says owners should expect to get a little more out of each new vehicle when confined to city driving (roughly 267 miles for the EUV and 280 miles for the regular Bolt), while more demanding highway driving will drain the battery faster (about 223 miles for the EUV and 233 miles for the regular Bolt).
The Bolt was one of the first real long-range options to hit the EV market that wasn’t made by Tesla. And while it’s disappointing that GM wasn’t able to leverage some of the technology it’s developing for its upcoming Ultium series of battery packs (which will power far more capable EVs like the electric Silverado pickup or the pair of electric Hummers), the new Bolts offer more than enough range for most people’s daily driving needs at a more palatable price point.
The bigger question with these new Bolts will be the reliability of their battery packs. GM recently had to issue a recall in response to a handful of reports of fires in the battery packs, and so did Hyundai, which used the same LG Chem batteries in its Kona EVs. The Detroit automaker’s fix involves installing additional software to monitor for abnormalities in the battery packs, and it told The Verge that this software would be installed on all new Bolts moving forward.
