Chevy Bolt had best sales ever after recalls and leads in mainstream EV sales says GM
2022 Chevrolet Bolt EUV
GM released its 2022 year-end sales update and is touting the humble Chevy Bolt’s best sales year ever, calling the Bolt and Bolt EUV the “#1 mainstream EV series” in Q3 and Q4.
GM only has one significant electric model line so far, the Chevy Bolt. It also just started selling the Cadillac Lyriq and the GMC Hummer EV, but both of those are more expensive and much more limited production.
GM has several other electric models coming within the next year or two as its Ultium battery platform gets ready for prime time. These include the Equinox, Blazer, and Silverado EVs. But for the time being, the Bolt makes up the vast majority of GM’s current EV sales.
Bolt sales were up sharply year over year, with more sales growth than all but one of Chevy’s models (the Malibu) and two other GM models (XT4, Terrain). Bolt sold 22,073 vehicles in 2021 and 38,120 in 2022, a 72% increase for this model line. Most of GMs other models showed either sales declines or more modest growth, with the company overall adding 2.5% to sales year over year.
So, Bolt sales are increasing significantly, like many other electric models are, while gas car sales are showing much smaller growth.
But that’s not the whole story.
GM and the Bolt have had a tough past couple years, with a protracted recall that partially or totally impacted four quarters, and production only resuming in April 2022. So sales for both last year and this year were affected by that recall.
This resulted in a dismal 2021 and early 2022 for GM’s EV sales, which resulted in GM falling behind Ford and selling comically low numbers of EVs in Q4 (26 total) and Q1 (457 total). Which also meant comically high percentage increases from their meager 2021 numbers, with Q4 Bolt sales up 94,600% YoY and YTD Hummer EV sales up 85,300% YoY.
After finally getting back to selling the car, GM slashed the MSRP by ~$6,000 in June, making the Bolt the cheapest EV available in America. Sales were also boosted this year, as compared to last year, with the introduction of the larger Bolt EUV model with more storage space for a not-much-higher price.
This is why GM’s release says the Bolt was the “#1 mainstream EV series in Q3 and Q4,” which is after the recall finished and GM was finally able to sell these cars in earnest again. While GM doesn’t define “mainstream” in their release, we suspect this means “not counting Tesla.”
GM’s Bolt sales were probably negatively affected near the end of the year, though, as we got closer to the deadline in the Inflation Reduction Act, which would re-qualify GM for the federal EV tax credit – especially after the US Treasury delayed its guidance on battery sourcing requirements, which means the Bolt will have access to the $7,500 tax credit at least until March, making it a screaming deal until then.
GM also said that the Bolt EV had the highest mix of buyers under 36 compared to its EV competitors, an important demographic for automakers seeking to build brand loyalty. It sees EVs as a growth opportunity and plans to increase Bolt production to more than 70,000 units this year to meet strong global demand in addition to spinning up its Ultium platform and releasing new EVs in the coming quarters.
Electrek’s Take
There are a lot of factors here, but in short, it looks like the Bolt is still selling impressively well for a model that first shipped in 2017, is based on older technology, and has a planned end of life in the next couple years as GM shifts to its new Ultium platform.
And, now that the Bolt is such a great deal, it earned our award as Electrek’s Vehicle of the Year despite this age. It’s just the best bang for your buck you can get, not just out of any EV, but out of any vehicle on the road. Particularly given the EV tax credit situation.
So, we’re not surprised to see it doing well in sales, and we hope GM can build enough of them to satisfy the high demand they must be seeing for this car. We’re hearing from a lot of readers who are having trouble finding a Bolt at all from their local dealers, much less at MSRP, even as auto industry supply constraints start to loosen up a little.
If you’re looking for a Bolt, you can use our links to contact your local dealers about the 2023 Chevy Bolt EV or 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV. Make sure to take delivery before “sometime in March” if you want to take advantage of the current tax credit situation, but consult a tax professional first to ensure you qualify.
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Kilito Chan | Moment | Getty Images
Electricity prices are rising quickly for U.S. households, even as overall inflation has cooled.
Electricity prices rose 4.5% in the past year, according to the consumer price index for May 2025 — nearly double the inflation rate for all goods and services.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in May that retail electricity prices would outpace inflation through 2026. Prices have already risen faster than the broad inflation rate since 2022, it said.
“It’s a pretty simple story: It’s a story of supply and demand,” said David Hill, executive vice president of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former general counsel at the U.S. Energy Department.
There are many contributing factors, economists and energy experts said.
At a high level, the growth in electricity demand and deactivation of power-generating facilities are outstripping the pace at which new electricity generation is being added to the electric grid, Hill said.
Prices are regional
U.S. consumers spent an average of about $1,760 on electricity in 2023, according to the EIA, which cited federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course, cost can vary widely based on where consumers live and their electricity consumption. The average U.S. household paid about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in March 2025 — but ranged from a low of about 11 cents per kWh in North Dakota to about 41 cents per kWh in Hawaii, according to EIA data.
Households in certain geographies will see their electric bills rise faster than those in others, experts said.
Residential electricity prices in the Pacific, Middle Atlantic and New England regions — areas where consumers already pay much more per kilowatt-hour for electricity — could increase more than the national average, according to the EIA.
“Electricity prices are regionally determined, not globally determined like oil prices,” said Joe Seydl, a senior markets economist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
The EIA expects average retail electricity prices to increase 13% from 2022 through 2025.
That means the average household’s annual electricity bill could rise about $219 in 2025 relative to 2022, to about $1,902 from $1,683, according to a CNBC analysis of federal data. That assumes their usage is unchanged.
But prices for Pacific area households will rise 26% over that period, to more than 21 cents per kilowatt-hour, EIA estimates. Meanwhile, households in the West North Central region will see prices increase 8% in that period, to almost 11 cents per kWh.
However, certain electricity trends are happening nationwide, not just regionally, experts said.
Data centers are ‘energy hungry’
The QTS data center complex under development in Fayetteville, Georgia, on Oct. 17, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Electricity demand growth was “minimal” in recent decades due to increases in energy efficiency, according to Jennifer Curran, senior vice president of planning and operations at Midcontinent Independent System Operator, who testified at a House energy hearing in March. (MISO, a regional electric-grid operator, serves 45 million people across 15 states.)
Meanwhile, U.S. “electrification” swelled via use of electronic devices, smart-home products and electric vehicles, Curran said.
Now, demand is poised to surge in coming years, and data centers are a major contributor, experts said.
Data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.
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Data center electricity use tripled to 176 Terawatt-hours in the decade through 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Use is projected to double or triple by 2028, the agency said.
Data centers are expected to consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the Energy Department said.
They’re “energy hungry,” Curran said. Demand growth has been “unexpected” and largely due to support for artificial intelligence, she said.
The U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, according to the International Energy Agency.
Continued electrification among businesses and households is expected to raise electricity demand, too, experts said.
The U.S. has moved away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to reduce planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions.
For example, more households may use electric vehicles rather than gasoline-powered cars or electric heat pumps versus a gas furnace — which are more efficient technologies but raise overall demand on the electric grid, experts said.
Population growth and cryptocurrency mining, another power-intensive activity, are also contributors, said BPC’s Hill.
‘All about infrastructure’
Thianchai Sitthikongsak | Moment | Getty Images
As electricity demand is rising, the U.S. is also having problems relative to transmission and distribution of power, said Seydl of J.P. Morgan.
Rising electricity prices are “all about infrastructure at this point,” he said. “The grid is aged.”
For example, transmission line growth is “stuck in a rut” and “way below” Energy Department targets for 2030 and 2035, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, wrote in a March energy report.
Shortages of transformer equipment — which step voltages up and down across the U.S. grid — pose another obstacle, Cembalest wrote. Delivery times are about two to three years, up from about four to six weeks in 2019, he wrote.
“Half of all US transformers are near the end of their useful lives and will need replacing, along with replacements in areas affected by hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” Cembalest wrote.
Transformers and other transmission equipment have experienced the second highest inflation rate among all wholesale goods in the US since 2018, he wrote.
Meanwhile, certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online, said BPC’s Hill. There has also been inflation in prices for equipment and labor, so it costs more to build facilities, he said.
In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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