The Chevy Blazer EV Launch Has Gone from Rough to Worse as GM Issues Stop-Sale

[ethbr1]

Wow, the Edmunds article has a list of the 23 issues the dealership flagged when they brought the car in: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2024-chevy-blazer-ev-long-t... (at bottom of article)

It sounds like one or more hardware manufacturing defects and/or full software crashes triggered under normal vehicle operation.

Which sounds like QA was compressed / skipped to hit a launch date.

Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later"

[phkahler]

>> Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later"

I knew someone who worked at GM in OTA (over the air updates) and I said not to let them use that capability to slip schedules and fix it later. She said there were definitely teams wanting to use it that way, but she was pushing back. That was several years ago. Maybe they lost that battle.

[ivraatiems]

Should've just kept selling the Bolt. You know, the immensely popular, cheap, established vehicle brand they've been making for years? Oh well.

[yuppie_scum]

Good news for you bud https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44639082/chevrolet-bolt-e...

[claytongulick]

Or the Volt.

That's the one I really wanted.

50 miles electric, extended range gas at over 40mpg.

[7thaccount]

Yeah right? What was the reason?

[a_vanderbilt]

No CarPlay and reliability issues have doomed this car out of the gate. Incompetent management will throw their hands up and say "We tried!", ignoring all of the reasons why it failed. It's an electric vehicle, provide reliable electronics (you already figured this out in your gas-powered vehicles) and a decent infotainment system and people will love it. Tesla managed to dominate the market doing little else besides making it fast.

[nradov]

Well Tesla doesn't support CarPlay either. Apparently a lot of consumers don't care much.

[to11mtm]

Ouch.

Kinda follows the trend I'm hearing with carmakers of late however.

Just yesterday my BIL was opining that his dad was 'thinking about a Chevy' after being a F150 driver for decades (home improvement type industry.) I warned him that a colleague had a Blazer in the shop for 3 months waiting on a part... i.e. every manufacturer seems to be strugglebussing with meeting ship dates while keeping quality and proper service supply chains in place.

I do think a big challenge is 'overplanning'; Ford did some things right with the Maverick and F150 Lightning (i.e. using as much as what they had on hand in a way to minimize overall risk) but did make some missteps along the way (General supply allocation for the Maverick, poor handling of parts supply chain for known CSPs and other warranty repairs, build quality of some early models being bad enough to somehow lead to wet floormats.)

If you're gonna go out knowing things may have issues, you must have a plan to make it right for the consumer in an orderly fashion. The increasing levels of abstraction/bureaucracy in warranty and defect handling in products over the last 20 years is frankly sad.

[ethbr1]

If I'm in the place where I still need a truck, and there's a decent used extended warranty option, the Lightning extended-range battery is my current next vehicle to beat.

Backfeeding home power in the event of an outage or running essentially everything in an off-grid scenario is too game changing to ignore.

[scrapcode]

A common reply to "how is it working at X?" is that it is only as good as your immediate supervisor. I think this is the same with vehicle brands, except that your experience owning them is only as good as your nearest dealership/maintenance garage. I have had a terrible experience with almost all brands at some point. Most recently, Ford completely refusing to acknowledge widespread issues with their 10-speed transmission- to the point many Ford dealerships in the area quit taking transmission service work completely. I quit fighting them and switched to a Chevy, and I'll just have to wait until it malfunctions to see how bad the nearest service department is.

[cyberax]

It's especially hilarious because their official reason for their shitty infotaiment system was "safety".

[belZaah]

To me, this sounds like a good old Conway's law. The EV fundamentally changes the architecture of the car: what it's made of, what's the role of each component is and how these are interlinked. In particular, there's a shift from mechanical coponents to software components. This would imply, that the structure of the organization designing the car should also change in fundamental ways. But in absence of an enterprise architect (as in "a person responsible for the architecture of the entire enterprise"), it can be tricky to synchronize organizational change with engineering change due to separation of responsibilities. Also, interaction of physical components is rather straightforward to determine (separate teams for the battery and motors is obvious) whereas software components are intangible.

[dang]

Recent and related:

GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943 - Dec 2023 (85 comments)

Our Chevy Blazer EV Has 23 Problems After Only 2 Months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749417 - Dec 2023 (48 comments)

[mlinhares]

Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is just incompetence.

[FirmwareBurner]

N'ah. Big auto execs are really that incompetent, they don't need to go out if their way to intentionally fuck up something.

They should dogfood their own products more often instead of being chauffered in Porsches or Aston Martins (I imagine).

[philwelch]

Most businesses will go bankrupt and cease to exist if they are run incompetently. In GM’s case, this almost happened during the GFC but the federal government nationalized it before eventually restructuring it and selling it back to private shareholders. You see, GM—and GM’s supply chain—is “too big to fail” (and accounts for a lot of jobs in Midwestern swing states).

[j33zusjuice]

It’s cool, we’ll just bail them out again when they tank the company with shit products.

[havaloc]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPDA7dMOT4

[daft_pink]

Remember when they told Bolt owners to park more than 50 feet away from other vehicles due to the risk of fire?

I really wanted to rent one on Turo and create a youtube video where I pulled into some small business' parking lot and coned off all the spaces in the lot, because apparently it's not safe to park next to a Chevy Bolt.

GM is so outrageous. They should have let them go bankrupt.

[facialwipe]

Why do I have the feeling that the Kia boys are about to become the Chevy boys…

[orenlindsey]

This is why nobody likes American car brands. The brands that make them cut corners and things like this happen. Teslas are the only American-made cars that are somewhat high-quality.

[LeoPanthera]

> Teslas are the only American-made cars that are somewhat high-quality.

As the owner of one, this is absolutely not the case.

But I don't even think this is the biggest problem. It wouldn't matter so much if they'd just fix them when they break, but they don't. They go out of their way, and do everything possible to avoid fixing them, to the point of being rude. I hate it.

[Etheryte]

"Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom" [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38760933

[tw04]

The mustang mach-e is infinitely higher build quality than anything Tesla makes. From body panel alignment to interior squeaks and rattles.

[EthicalSimilar]

I think many people would disagree that Tesla are high-quality, even “somewhat”.

[FirmwareBurner]

  >Tesla
  >High quality

Pick one.

[iancmceachern]

It's actually the exact opposite.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Shame - it's quite a sharp looking design.

[alphabettsy]

I don’t think this is surprising to anyone who’s been into cars for any length of time. GM isn’t generally known for quality.

Chassis tuning lately and the LS engines is about it.