This was the car that really gave me doubts about the Bolt. It started getting a lot of coverage right when I got the Bolt and just about everyone seemed to agree it was one of the best value EVs available. I had not considered it my first time shopping, partly because it wasn’t quite available yet, and partly because at around $40k, its sticker price was out of my budget (and I didn’t want to mess with the tax credit). However, this time around I knew I had to consider it. It wasn’t really the type of car that I wanted (it would have been a better replacement for the Outback than the Bolt), but more than anything I wanted to use it as a test: for less than $5k more than my Bolt, did it make my Bolt look like a bad deal?

From an electric car perspective I already knew the answer was a resounding “yes.” It had a similar range, much faster charging, built in route-planning, 3 years of free EA charging, Plug and Charge (now), the list went on…I mean a lot had changed since the Bolt’s release in 2017. In terms of non-EV specific features it was a much closer fight, but the ID.4 had some good base features. Since my main problems with the Bolt were no Adaptive Cruise (the ID.4 had standard) and poor build quality I knew it would come down to how it felt in person. I rushed to do this before my buyback – hoping it would help me make up my mind whether to go through with it. Test drives were a little hard to come by because they were selling so fast, but I found a dealer near me that was allocated a demo unit specifically for test drives. The upshot of my visit was that it did give me confidence to give back the Bolt, but didn’t convince me that the ID.4 was the replacement. I did eventually put down a deposit for one, just so I could get a spot in line, since that was really the only way to secure one at MSRP.

The quality of the car and the dealer experience were what convinced me to ditch the Bolt. It had the solid feel and nicer materials that I was missing in the Bolt, and for really close to the same price. And perhaps more importantly, the people selling them had actually been trained on the car. They were knowledgeable and even excited about it – a far cry from my Chevrolet experience. Driving it left me disappointed though. Having already become a one-pedal driver I was really bummed by the weak regen, even in the higher setting. Accelerating wasn’t much better. Although I was in the single motor version, even when I later drove the AWD model it just felt like they had tuned out so much of the responsiveness of the electric motors. I get that they did this to appeal to more people, and I hope that worked, but I wished for more.