Good morning!
The Bolt can't charge at 100 kW at "100 kW" stations. It might do 70 kW. But it doesn't matter, since almost all of them in northern CA are 24 kW and the rest are only 50 kW when they actually work and are not busy.
Today's CCS stations were installed to support today's 75-100 mile CCS cars. Some will be upgraded and lots of new ones will be installed. New ones along highway routes will largely support 50 kW and greater now that cars will exist that are capable of charging at those rates.
Tesla owners are worried about Supercharger congestion with 8-16 plugs available and 100-135 kW charging rates. How exactly will the Bolt work out any level of increased adoption with single or even double 24 kW and 50 kW plugs? Oh, right, it won't. Further, the cost of driving on the NRG eVGo network makes gasoline look cheap
Lots of CCS stations will be installed to support the coming longer-range cars from a variety of car makers.
The $4.95 per session charge or the monthly charge both present awful dilemmas.
I expect the non-subscription per-session pricing for occasional road-trip charging will be competitive with pre-paid Supercharger access. Tesla has been ambiguous about the pricing model for Supercharging for the Model 3. I think it was about $2,500 pre-paid for S60 owners. I think it is unlikely to be "free" like it is with an $80k+ Model S. I expect either an S60 like option fee or some form of pay-as-you-charge scheme for Model 3 owners.
Again, are you assured that the Bolt ships with what is necessary to charge at over 200A? Matter of fact, we don't even know if the Bolt will charge even at 200A if you can find one of the few stations that can charge that fast.
GM hasn't provided full details about charging capability yet. All we know is that it supports at least 50 kW, adds 90 miles in 30 minutes or 160 miles in 60 minutes. Those rates tend to imply support for at least 150A since the Bolt EV's average pack voltage is 350V. An engineer was quoted as saying the final supported peak charging rate was still being decided at the time of the last round of Bolt EV PR. I doubt that they will announce support for over the 200A rate that is the official max current in the existing CCS specification, at least for the 2017 Bolt EV model year.
At 70 mph, the Leaf has 98% battery roundtrip efficiency. How is GM going to improve on that? At 250 pounds heavier and worse aerodynamics, the Bolt is guaranteed to have terrible efficiency at highway speeds.
I'm guessing the Bolt EV will have better highway efficiency than the S60 which was 97 MPGe. The LEAF is about 102 MPGe highway. I expect the Bolt EV to be about the same highway efficiency as the LEAF.
The LEAF's battery roundtrip efficiency is mostly irrelevant to highway efficiency. The real opportunities for improved powertrain efficiency will come from the motor inverter, motor and final reduction gears. There are still significant opportunities there but the LEAF is already pretty good. The Bolt's motor efficiency looks good in the SAE paper they published in April but we will have to see how all the various elements add up together in the final overall efficiency specs.
The Model S:
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/fact2014teslamodels.pdf
Hits 97% battery roundtrip efficiency, 91% on board charger efficiency for a pretty good overall trip efficiency of 89%. The overall trip efficiency beats the Leaf, the i3, and the Ford Focus EV at 70 mph.
The Chevy Spark EV on the other hand:
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/fact2015chevroletspark.pdf
Wow, just terrible. Only 95% battery roundtrip efficiency and 83% on board charger efficiency for an overall trip efficiency of just 79%. Since it is so small, the overall CDa lets the Spark still hit a low Wh/mi at 70 mph, but the Bolt has a bigger CDa than a Leaf. Therefore the Bolt needs to have a far better power electronics and motor setup than the Spark EV if they hope to even get close to the efficiency of the Leaf.
Battery charging efficiency is important in general but is not really relevant to road-trip usability. The Spark EVs AC charger is less efficient largely because it was limited to 16A whereas the Model
S supports 40A. Faster charging rates mean less time spent on fixed overhead energy consumption. Tesla cars are noticeably more efficient charging at 32 or 40 amps than at 16. The Bolt EV has a new AC charger design that supports 32A. Even the new 16A charger in the 2016 Volt is quite a bit more efficient (~90%) than the old design that the Spark EV and older Volt likely shared. In any case, built-in AC charger efficiency is irrelevant to the external DC charger HW used during road trips.
Now, the Model S was initially sold in 2012 and 2013 without all those pieces in place, but there was certainly the promise that it would eventually be there for the vehicles sold. And it was for many. Even with the Model 3 launch, there will be plenty of places where the criteria isn't met. But the rapid growth of the Supercharger network means there are fewer and fewer places where that's true.
The Bolt, on the other hand, does not meet any of that criteria. The long distance range isn't there. The charging network would have to be spaced around 100 miles apart and the charging speed isn't there. The realistic cadence for a Bolt is then 1.5 hours of driving, 55-120 minutes of charging
I think you are overstating your case.
There will be lots more CCS charging installed in the next few years. New interstate CCS chargers capable of supporting 40-70 kW or faster charging will predominate along highways. Plenty of slower CCS stations will also exist but mostly in metro areas and would usually be skipped over during road trips.
Occasional road trips of a few hundred miles a day should be entirely possible in a Bolt EV if 50+ kW charging stations are available along the route. A trip in an S90 or Model 3 with the larger pack option would be more convenient. A future S120 or Model 3 pack equivalent would be yet more convenient. Sometime in the next decade there may be an S150 charging at 700-800V instead of 350-400V and that will be even more convenient for frequent long-distance travel. I think it is a continuum rather than the stark binary yes/no you seem to see.
One of the additional problems for CCS is trying to choose the spacing. Since Tesla is designing all of their vehicles to hit about 200 miles of highway range, they can space the network accordingly (120-140 miles apart for 80% of the battery). CCS on the other hand has to cater to low range vehicles and potentially a raft of different sized batteries and therefore different highway ranges. So can we expect 10-20 plug CCS stations at 100 miles apart? Well, that's not the right spacing for a BMW i3 33 kWh nor an Audi Q6 e-tron. Likely, they will have to put them at a variety of shorter distances apart... which is great when they are all built out, but the cost of doing so... wow, to achieve the same utility as a the Supercharger network, they'd have to spend about 5-10x for the same geographical region.
Shorter range cars like the 114 mile (EPA combined city/highway) i3 33 kWh model you cite above are not going to be the primary customers of interstate CCS charging infrastructure. The Bolt EV will have almost twice that range as will other future CCS cars that people will primarily use for longer distance driving. While there may be some 24 kW stations mixed in along the way, the primary highway infrastructure is likely to loosely mimic Tesla's Supercharger layout for distance between the faster CCS chargers.
Autopilot is a HUGE advantage in addition to over-the air software updates and the big screen, and likely it will be even closer to fully autonomous; Autosteer was the reason I spent 6x as much on my Tesla vs my prior car
Most people aren't quite that obsessed to pay 6x to get AutoPilot. Fortunately, it and systems like it will be much cheaper in the next few years. Automated driving features won't be generally available in 2017 on the Bolt EV or the Model 3. GM is apparently planning to introduce automated driving features in some Bolt EVs used by Lyft drivers next year as an experiment. The 2018 Cadillac CT6 is supposed to have Autopilot-like capabilities (delayed a year from the rumored original plan) and this may well show up in future model year Bolt EVs.
The S and X are both record acceleration for their class & the Model 3 will likely be the same, better than any other car for its price range (i.e. likely the base will be quicker than cars under $40k.
If you are talking about BEVs this is probably true. If you include ICE cars then not so much. For example, the Ford Focus RS can do 0-60 mph in about 4.7 seconds and has a max speed of 165 mph for under $37,000. Similar ICE cars from Subaru and others also exist in that price and performance range.
The significantly better looking design will appeal to a larger audience, and it will likely be much higher range on a smaller/cheaper battery due to record aerodynamics for a mass produced car with a target of .21 coefficient of drag
Yet, strangely, the vast majority of cars purchased and on the road look more like a Bolt than a Model 3 or other sporty Euro-styled sedan.
While some argue the 3 will cost more for features people want, the base model 3 will still be better than a base bolt and at least people HAVE the options for bigger battery, performance, autopilot, supercharging that are not even available on a Bolt
Nobody outside of Tesla and GM know the base trim equipment vs options on the Bolt EV and Model 3. It's too soon to make that comparison.
In addition, misguided Bolt lovers like Jeff N (likely a GM exec) argue Bolts can be negotiated down in price at a dealer but from what I hear GM dealers charged 10k+ over MSRP for Volts outside of CARB credit states IF they even offered to sell them
LOL. No, I'm not a car exec and I don't work for GM. I own a Volt but that was my first GM car. Prior to that I have owned 3 Toyotas, a Honda Accord, and a small Ford pickup.
I bought my 2011 Volt in December, 2010 for MSRP through an ordinary local Chevy dealer in the SF Bay Area. Of course, dealers in low-volume areas of the country may attempt to extract higher profit margins but nobody is obliged to pay them. Anyone can buy a car for a reasonable price and minimal sales hassle using the Consumers Union or Costco car buying services. Anyone can buy a car from a high-volume deep-discount dealer in California and have it shipped for a few hundred dollars out-of-state. Or just price a car that way and tell a local dealer to match the price or else. It's not hard.
