The New Chevy Bolt Charges Quicker Than GM's Pricier EVs. It's More Proof That Voltage Matters

"There's a key reason why many EVs are expensive. Economies of scale just haven't kicked in as they have for gas cars. Over 100-plus years of building dino-burners, we've gotten pretty good at every individual part. There are plenty of firms that can build fuel pumps, turbochargers, alternators, and radiators at scale, leveraging hundreds of thousand-unit volumes to drive per-unit costs down."

"This is the backbone of every Ultium pack, a 103-amp-hour cell. These are arranged in 24-cell modules, which make up the basis of all GM-built packs. With EVs, automakers are having to build that whole supply chain from scratch. It's a lot harder to find a supplier to build an automotive-grade DC-to-DC converter than it is to find a fuel pump supplier, because only one of those technologies was in demand a decade ago."

"Automotive-grade batteries are highly specialized, and they're not one-size fits all. But at the same time, the more of any one single product you build, the more you can drive down costs with economies of scale. So if you can't use the same pack for every car, as different vehicles have different range demands, and you still want to offer a variety of models, you're in a pinch."

General Motors addresses the EV battery cost challenge through the Ultium platform, which standardizes 24-cell modules across diverse vehicle models from the GMC Hummer EV to the Chevy Equinox EV. This modular approach leverages economies of scale to reduce per-unit costs, a strategy critical since EV supply chains are newly developed compared to century-old internal combustion engine infrastructure. The new Bolt diverges from this standard architecture, utilizing a different battery configuration that delivers the best 10-80% charge time among GM's electric lineup. This design choice reflects the tension between standardization for cost efficiency and specialized configurations for performance optimization.

Read at insideevs.com