GM Issues Stop-Sale Order On Chevrolet Blazer EV After Breakdown Reports
Following a week of reports about problems with the new Chevrolet Blazer EV, including InsideEVs reporter Kevin Williams experiencing a breakdown in one during a road trip, General Motors has halted sales of the electric vehicle to fix certain software issues.
Automotive News reports that the stop-sale order was issued late Friday and affects “a limited number” of Blazer EVs. The automaker did not say how many are impacted; about 1,000 are currently for sale nationwide, according to Cars.com.
Chevrolet engineers are working on solving issues related to the vehicle’s touchscreen, “and, rarely, during charging attempts at some public DC fast chargers,” according to Automotive News. Kevin encountered both issues during his attempted Ohio to North Carolina drive this week, which ended with the car stuck at an Electrify America station in rural Virginia.
“We’re aware that a limited number of customers have experienced software-related quality issues with their Blazer EV. Customer satisfaction is our priority, and as such, we will take a brief pause on new deliveries,” Scott Bell, vice president of global Chevrolet, told Automotive News in a statement. (GM did not immediately respond to a request for comment from InsideEVs.) The automaker has not indicated if a recall will be issued to existing Blazer EVs currently on the road.
The stop-sale order also comes after car-buying website Edmunds issued a scathing report about the Blazer EV the staff purchased for evaluation two months ago. The publication reported window switches that refused to work, the infotainment display getting stuck in a shutdown loop, a number of error messages and the failure of various driving functions. “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,” the publication said.
Moreover, Blazer EV owners who contacted InsideEVs following our report indicated similar problems, as well as other issues with GM’s Ultium-branded cars. That name refers to the automaker’s new common software and battery platform due to underpin all its future EVs. Though the Ultium platform is considered crucial to GM’s future and its goal of going all-electric by 2035, the cars themselves have been subject to numerous delays throughout the year, generally slow rollouts and issues with early examples.
We’ll update this story if we get more information from GM.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
