General Motors Kills Another Electric Car ⇥ theverge.com

Dan Seifert, the Verge:

This [the Chevrolet Bolt] was a brand-new EV for a total cost well under $30,000. There’s literally nothing quite like it on the road, and it’s a shame that GM has decided it no longer has a future.

[…]

But Americans don’t like to buy compact hatchbacks (RIP, BMW i3, another small EV that’s no longer available). Other parts of the world already or soon will have their choice of many compact and affordable EVs, including ones made by GM itself. Instead, we’ll get cars and trucks with obscene amounts of horsepower and oversize battery packs that cost more to produce and charge and aren’t practical for the kind of driving most Americans actually do.

First, an obligatory note that a world in which every internal combustion car is replaced with an electric car still incentivizes the same bad city planning behaviours, and that we should encourage building other options wherever possible. I am a cycling commuter and it is actually faster for me than driving. Trains are great, too.

But some people are still going to use cars, at least some of the time. It would be great if there were more choices — not just in price or brand, but in form factor, too. Unfortunately, the Canadian auto market is basically the same as the U.S. one and, so, we end up with a sea of samey SUVs, crossovers, and trucks, all of which are too big to the extent a separate license should be required to drive many of them. They make the roads more dangerous for others, which drives some people to buy a similar-sized vehicle for their own safety perception. It is madness.