The Bolt has CarPlay. The screen is much nicer in the Tesla, but CarPlay brings a lot of additional functionality and flexibility.
The Bolt is lighter, more nimble, smaller. For city driving, it's really handy.
The Bolt has normal door handles that don't require any special movement to open them. Normal locks, mechanical glove box latch, full windshield wiper controls, a normal shift handle to select regen (good because my wife hates regen, I love it).
The Bolt has slightly stronger regen, especially with the paddles. And it has a saner regen-to-stop mode, which only functions in drive. Unlike Tesla, which makes you use the accelerator pedal to get the car to reverse down the driveway (which just feels weird).
The seats are crappy on both. I prefer cloth to vinyl, though. And I especially don't like the slippery vinyl on Tesla's steering wheel.
The Bolt is vastly cheaper. Like, half as much.
The Tesla charges much faster with DC fast charging. If you only charge at home they are identical in this regard.
Overall, I feel like the Bolt is a much, much better deal if you factor in the cost. The Tesla is much faster, has more range, heated rear seats, and it makes fart noises. Of course, it also has AP, which some people like.
The Bolt feels like a car that happens to be electric. The Tesla feels like a computer that happens to have wheels.
My wife would be happy with another Bolt when the lease on this one expires next year. I won't buy another Tesla without CarPlay and proper wiper controls, but my next EV will need to be faster than the Bolt. So I'm thinking Taycan.
The Bolt makes me wish that VW would make an electric Golf R. Same size, better interior, more power. Aside from getting screwed over by LG's flubbed manufacturing of the batteries, the Bolt really over-delivers compared to what I expected from it.
I like this, simple and effective.
You can't have it in the US, though.
For example, GM can add a heat pump to improve their winter performance (Bolt) but if it is a new part that needs to be integrated into their assembly, there’s a cost to it that cannot be recouped. Batteries are already expensive. Tesla is less sensitive to costs as it had no profit pressures.
Startups and large companies necessarily need to have different thinking and that’s ok. When the giants turn around, they can quickly copy the upstart. Car engineering is not as complicated as rocket science.
ICE vehicles have endured every known failure you can think of and car manufacturers have fixed all of these...over time.
It will take some time before all the snafu's with EV's are ironed out. Tesla is at the forefront since its more of a tech-company than a car manufacturer.
BTW: Volkswagen and Mercedes already have heat-pumps in their EV's.
Gasoline vehicles eventually outcompeted them by reaching 60mph and having more range (sound familiar?) but the parent isn’t wrong about Rockefeller, cheap and abundant fuel came 2 years later:
> …growing electrification of lighting produced a drop in kerosene demand, creating a supply problem. It appeared that the burgeoning oil industry would be trapped into over-producing kerosene and under-producing gasoline since simple distillation could not alter the ratio of the two products from any given crude. The solution appeared in 1911 when the development of the Burton process allowed thermal cracking of crude oils, which increased the percent yield of gasoline from the heavier hydrocarbons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline
Jay Leno has an entertaining segment driving around LA in his restored Baker, he can tell you all about it, fascinating vehicle: (starts at 3:20)
It's basically head and shoulders above the competitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1kHsd3Ocxc
Tesla understood that heat management is key to an EV, so they invested in designing a compact and elegant system (Google “octovalve”) to move heat wherever it was helpful to send it.
They also use intelligence to allow the car to optimize itself for charging. For example, you can use the Tesla smartphone app to have your car wake itself up and warm or cool both the battery and cabin while still plugged in. And if you use navigation to plan your charging stops, it will automatically precondition the battery pack as you are getting close for optimal charging speed.
Most of the cars that performed poorly on that graph were because of shoddy engineering by people who don’t understand the problem space.
That’s not a problem with EVs, it’s a problem with bad engineers and management who care about the wrong things.