GM Pauses Blazer EV Sales After Customer Complaints
In the wake of numerous testimonies concerning malfunctions involving the recently unveiled Chevrolet Blazer EV, GM has decided to forego selling the electric vehicle until any software difficulties have been rectified; this follows Kevin Williams, a InsideEVs newsman, who met with failure during his drive.
On Friday, Automotive News reported that General Motors had issued a stop-sale order on “a limited number” of its Blazer EVs. Although GM did not disclose how many vehicles were affected, Cars.com estimates that around 1,000 of them are currently for sale in the U.S.
Chevrolet engineers are hard at work trying to fix issues with the vehicle’s touchscreen, “and, rarely, during charging attempts at some public DC fast chargers,” as reported by Automotive News. Kevin experienced both of these problems during his trip from Ohio to North Carolina this week, which concluded with his car stuck at an Electrify America station in rural Virginia.
“We understand that a select few Blazer EV owners have experienced some software quality issues,” the automaker announced in a statement to InsideEVs. “To make sure our customers are having an excellent experience with their vehicle, we have decided to temporarily suspend sales of Blazer EVs. Our team is working diligently to implement a fix, and owners will be contacted with further instructions on how to arrange their update. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
Scott Bell, the Vice President of Chevrolet, remarked: “We place a great emphasis on customer satisfaction and as a consequence, we will temporarily be putting a halt to new deliveries.” The automaker asserted that the issue does not involve safety.
The stop-sale order arrives after Edmunds, a car-buying website, published a scathing report on the Blazer EV that they had bought for testing two months prior. According to their report, the window switches were not functioning, the infotainment display was stuck in a loop of shutdowns, and a number of errors messages appeared. In their words, “What we got back from the dealer was alarming: the single longest list of major faults we at Edmunds have ever seen on a new car.”
Furthermore, after InsideEVs released their report, Blazer EV owners who got in touch with them reported similar problems in addition to other difficulties with GM’s Ultium-branded vehicles. This name is used to refer to the carmaker’s new common platform and battery setup that will be used to support all its upcoming EVs. Even though the Ultium platform is viewed as essential for GM’s future and its plan to become fully electric by 2035, the vehicles themselves have encountered multiple delays throughout the year, a slow introduction and issues with first models. (GM added today that the Blazer EV stop-sale is “not related to Ultium or Google Built-In.”)
This report has been revised to contain a pronouncement from General Motors.
Reach out to Patrick George at patrick.george@insideevs.com to get into contact with him.
