Chevy’s Ultium Bolt will need these 5 things to be successful
After dropping hints earlier, today GM CEO Mary Barra announced that Chevy would be re-release its popular Chevy Bolt after it gets an Ultium makeover. The Boltium! After owning two Bolts from 2017 until today, along with other popular EVs from Tesla and others, I feel like I have a good idea of what GM needs to succeed here.
I want to say first that GM is starting with an extraordinary car in the Bolt that even today fills the needs of many EV buyers. The Bolt has been improving in sales, and this year it is doing better than ever. But GM is famous for killing its most loved EVs.
What will a new 2025 Bolt Ultium need to have to make it successful?
1. Fast NACS charging
The easiest and most likely upgrade to the current Bolt is in the fast charging area. In 2017, when most fast chargers were at 50kW, the 54kW max charging rate of the Bolt made some sense. It wasn’t future proof, but it made sense and would be a good enough experience.
However, a lot changed from 2017-2023 including the fast charging rates on most EVs getting into the 200+kW with some trucks hitting 300+kW; what didn’t change in 2023 was the Bolt’s 54kW fast charging speed.
I’m not saying the Bolt and its small car battery needs to charge at 200+kW, though it would be nice. I think having 150kW charging over half the charging cycle would allow 20-minute fast charging stops. This should be fairly easy with GM’s modular Ultium batteries, which currently charge up to 350kW and beyond on the Hummer and Silverado.
Add to that the NACS interface, which GM has already promised on its 2025 EVs, allowing the Bolt to charge at not only its current charger options but adding Tesla’s very robust and ubiquitous network. With this setup, you can pretty much kiss range anxiety goodbye. More importantly, it would allow city dwellers and folks with on street parking to use the Bolt charging more like a gas station once every week or so.
Also Bolt owners won’t get ostracized at fast charging stations if they are in and out in 20 minutes versus the current situation where they often have to stay for over an hour.
2. RWD/AWD option
For those of us that live in snowy and hilly climates, the Bolt’s FWD is something that works for 350 days out of the year. That’s fine for a third car or if you work from home, but being reliably able to get out those snow days would be a nice addition.
I’m not saying I need another 200hp motor (though that would be fun!) but even a low power 50 horsepower motor to power the other set of wheels in an emergency situation would be great and worth a few thousand dollars for those who need it. GM actually showed off a low power motor to do this exact thing at its 2020 Battery Day event.
And since we learned that the Blazer EV can be FWD, RWD or AWD, why not offer all of these options for the Bolt? If they aren’t going to make the 2x200hp version, I’d prefer my stronger motor in the rear. Oh, and how about light towing for bikes and Home Depot trailers?
3. Hot hatch proud, not another CUV
From the beginning, GM kept insisting the Bolt was an SUV, first calling it a “Micro-SUV” at launch. Because everyone wants an SUV?! Then it released the EUV version that actually looked a lot more like a typical bland SUV. That added three more inches of leg room in the back, yet somehow reduced the overall internal space.
Well guess what? Not everyone wants a big honkin’ SUV! Even if they do, Chevy has both the Equinox and the Blazer to offer.
In fact, I think GM might have been shocked back into reality at all the hype and excitement around the tiny 3.4 sec 0-60 Volvo EX30, which has remarkably similar specs to the Chevy Bolt. I imagine that really helped get the Bolt off the chopping block with something like, “We could make this with almost no effort.” In fact, Mary Barra has said that the development time of the Ultium Bolt will be much shorter than normal.
I say embrace the hot hatch form factor that the Bolt has always embodied. Maybe lower the stance a bit, make the roof flatter, the interior cleaner, and we’d have something interesting here.
4. Improve the good things, don’t remove them
GM CEO Mary Barra said that the current Bolt prices could be improved by around 20% if it were moved to Ultium platform and that should allow GM to make the car profitable with similar specs.
I actually liked Chevy’s $1000 tie-in with Qmerit to install a home charger. I, however, had a bad experience with that $1000 credit that seems to be the fault of the dealer and the communications protocol that GM set up between the dealers and Qmerit. GM should circumvent the dealers and figure out a way to make that work a lot better; that, and/or continue to offer a $500 EVgo credit which is a nice way to start up the fast charging experience.
GM recently announced it plans to end smartphone projection in its upcoming EVs. Initially my tinfoil hat came on, and I thought this was a way to slow down their EV adoption rate. After some discussions with the folks at GM, they genuinely think their overall experience will be better if they get rid of Apple and Google smartphone projection. I will say that CarPlay and Android Auto are better than what GM offers in its in-car entertainment currently, so it should continue to offer those options until customers no longer think they are necessary.
An alternative if GM thinks it can out-software Google and Apple: Just put an iPad holder in the center stack display area, and get out of the way.
5. Dealer improvements
Chevy’s dealers, in my experience, have gone from straight up EV hostile to complacent in the six years I’ve been dealing with them, which is somehow a huge improvement! I think Chevy could do a lot of good here following their cross town rivals at Ford:
- Make an EV side of the business. Dedicated salespeople who only work in EVs and experts who know them inside and out. People who actually drive EVs to work and know basic electric stuff.
- Make DC fast chargers mandatory at Chevy dealerships. Subsidize them. Not only would this help show new owners how fast they can charge first hand, it would also offer a way to get customers back to the dealerships where they can upsell all kinds of unnecessary stuff (haha). Again, Ford is doing this and will have one of the largest DC fast charging networks in the US because of it.
If GM/Chevy can manage these five things, I can almost guarantee that the already successful Bolt will do even better in Ultium form.
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Elon Musk announced last night that Tesla is planning to “roughly double” its Robotaxi fleet in Austin next month. While an expansion of the pilot sounds positive on the surface, a look at the actual numbers reveals that Tesla is missing its own “end of year” target by a massive margin.
Just last month, Musk explicitly stated that Tesla aimed to have 500 Robotaxis in Austin by the end of the year. Now, “doubling” the current estimated fleet suggests the actual number will be closer to 60.
We have been closely tracking the rollout of the “Tesla Robotaxi” pilot in Austin, which launched back in June using Model Y vehicles.
Unlike the “Cybercab” unveiled in October, these vehicles are standard Model Ys equipped with Hardware 4, and critically, they are not driverless. They are part of a “supervised” pilot, meaning a Tesla employee sits in the front passenger seat (or driver’s seat for highway stints) to monitor the system with a finger on a killswitch ready to stop the car..
The service has been plagued by availability issues. As we reported recently, users in Austin are frequently met with “High Service Demand” messages, with wait times often exceeding 40 minutes. It’s not necessarily because there’s really “high demand”, but because Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi fleet” remains tiny.
In response to complaints about the service being “essentially unusable” due to lack of supply, Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) late Tuesday to promise relief:
“The Tesla Robotaxi fleet in Austin should roughly double next month.”
For those frustrated by the wait times, more cars are certainly welcome. But for investors and analysts tracking Tesla’s autonomous driving promises, this announcement serves as a confirmation of a significant missed deadline.
How many Tesla Robotaxis are in Austin?
To understand why “doubling” is actually a disappointment, we have to look at what Musk promised just a few weeks ago.
During his appearance on the All-In Podcast, which aired on October 31, 2025, Musk was explicitly asked about the scale of the fleet. His answer was unambiguous:
“We’re scaling up the number of cars to… probably we’ll have a thousand cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, probably 500 or more in the greater Austin area.”
Let’s do the math.
Based on observations from the Austin community and tracking of the vehicle VINs and plate numbers, the current Tesla Robotaxi fleet in Austin is estimated to be around 30 vehicles. In fact, 29 different Robotaxi license plates were spotted in Austin.
If Tesla “roughly doubles” that fleet in December, they will have approximately 60 vehicles on the road.
That is a far cry from the 500 that Musk projected just weeks ago. In fact, it represents a shortfall of nearly 90% against the target.
This massive miss in deployment targets is particularly ironic given Musk’s recent comments about competitors. When Waymo announced earlier this month that it had reached 2,500 active robotaxis across the US (with about 200 in Austin alone), Musk scoffed, calling them “Rookie numbers.”
Yet, the data shows that Waymo currently operates a fleet in Austin that is roughly 3x to 4x larger than what Tesla hopes to have after its expansion next month. And unlike Tesla’s pilot, Waymo’s Austin fleet is operating fully driverless, without human chaperones in the front seat.
Electrek’s Take
Another clear case of Elon Musk’s shifting the goalposts in Tesla’s autonomous driving programs, something we’ve unfortunately become accustomed to with Tesla’s autonomy timelines.
Musk said “500 cars by end of year” just a few weeks ago. It shows he is just saying numbers and nothing is grounded in reality.
Let’s be real about what this means. It means the “unsupervised” dream is still stuck in “supervised” reality. Scaling a fleet to 500 cars when you need 1,000+ human employees to drive them (staffing multiple shifts) is an HR nightmare, not a software update. The fact that they are only getting to ~60 tells me that the “supervised” requirement is the hard limit on their growth right now.
With 7 crashes in the first few months of operations, with supervisors preventing an unknown number of additional crashes, I don’t see Tesla removing them anytime soon.
Let me rephrase that. I don’t see Tesla safely removing the supervisors anytime soon.
As this whole operation appears to be more about optics than safety, I can see removing them before it’s ready.
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An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center with closed-loop cooling system on October 20, 2025 in Vernon, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The data centers that power the artificial intelligence revolution are driving up electricity prices for households — and price relief may not be coming anytime soon, according to energy experts.
Residential retail electricity prices in September were up 7.4%, to about 18 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the most recent data from the Energy Information Administration.
Electricity prices closely tracked inflation from 2013 to 2023, but will likely outpace inflation at least through 2026, according to an EIA forecast from May. Some regions will be hit harder than others, it said.
Energy experts and economists point to electricity-hungry data centers that underpin AI projects as a key reason for the price inflation.
These data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.
The basic reason for rising prices: Electricity demand — including actual and forecasted demand — is outstripping new supply.
Data centers are expected to consume anywhere from 6.7% to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated in December 2024.
John Quigley, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed to the “data center frenzy” as the primary driver of higher electricity prices for households.
“They’re pretty much the whole boat when it comes to increases in electricity demand,” Quigley said.
“It’s going to get worse,” he said.
Affordability is the ‘most salient issue’ in politics
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger delivers remarks during her election-night rally at the Greater Richmond Convention Center on November 04, 2025 in Richmond, Virginia.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
To be sure, data centers aren’t the only contributor to higher electricity prices, experts said.
But escalating electricity prices “can strain household budgets … undermine economic competitiveness … and hinder the electrification of energy systems,” researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in a recent analysis.
Rising electricity prices for U.S. households also come as politicians continue to leverage the affordability theme to garner support.
New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, both Democrats, promised to lower electricity bills for state residents. During her campaign, Spanberger said she wants to “make sure data centers don’t drive up energy costs for everyone else in Virginia.”
While on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump had also pledged to cut electricity and energy prices in half within his first 18 months of office.
“Affordability remains [the] most salient issue in politics,” Chris Krueger, a strategist at Washington Research Group, wrote in a research note on Tuesday.
Rising energy bills are pushing households deeper into debt, according to a recent analysis by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The average overdue balance on utility bills has risen 32% since 2022, to $789 from $597, it found. Utilities include electricity and other costs like gas and water.
Households that use electricity to heat their homes are estimated to see their winter heating bills rise to $1,205 this season, up about 10% from $1,093 last winter, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
“Consumers may again feel the pressure on their utility bills in the coming months, particularly if the winter is a cold one,” according to a Bank of America Institute report from October.
Booming electricity demand
the Google Midlothian Data Center in Midlothian, Texas, US, on Friday, Nov. 14, 2025.
Jonathan Johnson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AI euphoria has been driving the U.S. stock market ever higher — and fueling speculation that the market is in a tech-fueled bubble that might soon pop.
Regardless of whether the market’s AI rally proves sustainable, the scale of the technology’s growth is unmistakable. The International Energy Agency expects worldwide electricity demand from AI data centers to more than quadruple by 2030.
“Global electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double over the next five years, consuming as much electricity by 2030 as the whole of Japan does today,” Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, said in that analysis.
The effects will be “particularly strong” in countries like the U.S., where data centers are projected to account for almost half of the growth in overall electricity demand, according to the IEA analysis.
The U.S. economy is on track to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, the IEA found.
Forecasted demand has fueled the need for new infrastructure like power lines, substations and power plants, the costs of which companies at least partly pass on to residential consumers, said Quigley of UPenn.
In other words, households are partially subsidizing the AI data center expansion, he said.
While AI-driven electricity demand is happening across the U.S., some electric grid managers are better at managing costs than others,” said Quigley.
“The amount of the [price] increase will vary by region,” he said.
Amazon’s largest AI data center has seven completed buildings, with 30 total buildings planned on 1,200 acres in New Carlisle, Indiana, shown here on October 8, 2025.
Erin Black
For example, extreme weather like hurricanes, storms and wildfires contributed to “sizable” price growth in some states like California, where wildfire risk mitigation and liability insurance were “major cost drivers,” according to an October report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Energy Department laboratory managed by the University of California.
After accounting for the impact of inflation, 31 states actually saw electricity prices decline from 2019 to 2024, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers. Seventeen states saw price increases after inflation, especially in states on the West Coast and in the Northeast, they found.
Nationally, average retail electricity prices increased by 23% over that period in nominal terms, meaning before accounting for inflation, they found.
Increasing residential electrification, including electric vehicles, is among other factors pushing up electricity demand, according to the Bank of America Institute.
Environment
Uber launches true driverless robotaxi operations in the Middle East with WeRide [Video]
![Uber launches true driverless robotaxi operations in the Middle East with WeRide [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/11/Uber-Middle-East-WeRide.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Just over a year after Uber announced a strategic partnership in the Middle East with autonomous vehicle specialist WeRide, the companies have officially begun offering the public robotaxi rides without a driver or safety operator present on board.
Today’s latest milestone involving robotaxi operations in the Middle East dates back to September 2024, when Uber and WeRide initially announced a strategic partnership to bring autonomous rides to the UAE.
Three months later, the partner officially launched autonomous rides in Abu Dhabi, but with a safety operator present in the vehicle. At the time, Uber and WeRide said the supervised rides were “laying the groundwork” for a true driverless commercial operations planned for 2025.
That day has come.
WeRide and Uber have confirmed that commercial robotaxi operations are officially underway in Abu Dhabi without any safety operators on board – a first for the Middle East.
Uber rolls out Middle East robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi
Uber shared details of its latest milestone late this evening or in the afternoon in the Middle East, depending on where you are.
Beginning today (Wednesday) customers in Abu Dhabi can select an UberX or Uber Comfort ride that enables them to be matched with a fully autonomous WeRide robotaxi without a driver inside. Riders in the Middle East can also increase their chances of hailing one of these driverless rides by select the “Autonomous” option in the Uber app.
In order to qualify, the prosepctive rider’s route must be part of WeRide’s operating territory in Abu Dhabi and a dedicated WeRide GXR Robotaxi vehicle (seen in the featured image above) must be available.
Similar to Uber’s partnership with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta, the global rideshare network will oversee fleet operations for WeRide vehicles, handling end-to end rider support. It has tapped Tawasul Transport to facilitate vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, charging, and depot management. WeRide will remain responsible for vehicle testing.
As you may recall last spring, Uber and WeRide announced an expansion to their strategic partnership beyond the Middle East (although Dubai will be the city for its next robotaxi rollout). Over the next five years, Uber and WeRide intend to deploy true driverless public rides in 15 additional cities, some of which will be in Europe.
As promised, here’s some b-roll footage from Uber showing how riders in Abu Dhabi can order a WeRide robotaxi:
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