1st Chevy Bolt Deliveries Have Begun In California!

GM has finally begun delivering the first Chevy Bolts to buyers, buyers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Amusingly, the 3 vehicles were apparently delivered at a location rather close to Tesla’s local facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wonder how intentional that was?

Interestingly, the first 3 deliveries where to customers who previously used electric and/or hybrid vehicles — with the most recent vehicles being a BMW i3, a Chevy Spark EV, and a Toyota Prius — so not really gas car conquest sales.

That’s something that I’m very curious about — will the Chevy Bolt EV sell well amongst first-time electric or hybrid vehicle buyers? Or will it mostly be an upgrade for 1st-gen EV drivers? We’ll have to wait to see.

Here’s the video from Mary Barra’s tweet above in case that doesn’t easily play for you:

Autoblog provides more: “The 3 new Bolt owners are a retiree from Fremont who’d previously driven a Chevrolet Spark EV; a software developer in Castro Valley who ditched his BMW i3; and a real estate broker from Portola Valley who turned in his Toyota Prius.”

An interesting sample group. Representative? I guess that we’ll know fairly soon, as California deliveries are expected to pick up as the month goes on. Deliveries are also expected to begin in Oregon this month; with deliveries in New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts following in early 2017.

Supposedly, the Bolt EV will be available nationwide by mid-2017 — which would make sense, as then it would still beat the Tesla Model 3 to market, even if it’s a bit later to nationwide availability than initially thought. So, we should have a real idea about who exactly Bolt EV buyers are by late 2017. Hopefully there will be a lot of ICE vehicle conquests, but who knows at this point? The very positive Motor Trend review (Car of the Year award) should help sales amongst non-EV buyers somewhat I would think.

As a reminder, the Chevy Bolt is one of five finalists for the 2017 CleanTechnica Car of the Year award. Vote here:

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