Some here PMed me for some Bolt impressions. I've been really busy and pointed him to some earlier posts I made.
I'm going to try avoid repeating anything I've already written.
In terms of cargo room behind the rear seats, it's definitely smaller than my '13 Leaf. This doesn't really bother me. I don't carry a ton of stuff often.
I disabled the lighting that KeiJidosha pointed me to (good), but there are still quirks w/the headlight switch that always springs back to auto. If I power up my car in my garage, the damned HID headlights turn on. It's bright out. I don't need the headlights on. Thanks for putting an extra cycle on my HIDs.
(The HIDs are quite good, BTW. And, they're even standard on the lowest trim, LT.)
It seems like the stock wiper blades aren't very good. Others have complained about the Leaf stock ones and to me, the Mitsuba refills I got from a local Honda dealer for my Leaf are a lot better than the wipers that come w/the Bolt.
I am still annoyed by the too few memories on the stereo. Also, there doesn't seem to be any shortcut/easy way to directly switch sources on the stereo w/o poking around on the touchscreen or by navigating to a favorite/memory that happens to be a different source/radio band. I'm used to easily switching to XM, FM, aux, Bluetooth, etc. on my Leaf via the buttons on the left side of the stereo.
Also, activating camera while in drive is too many steps: home button > another button > camera vs. a single button press on Leaf.
The wiper control stalk and intermittent dial action and feel seem flimsy and cheap vs. my Leaf. And, they've reversed the directions for intermittent, off, low, high, etc. vs Toyota and Nissan conventions.
Other annoyances:
- It seems like there's no lock button at the rear hatch to lock all the doors after closing the hatch. My Leaf and Prius have that. I end up having to walk up to a door to press its lock button.
- I miss the Leaf eyebrow clock and outside temp. If I'm using CarPlay, the clock's on the left side of the big LCD and can be easy to miss or have it be blocked. There's no outside temp visible in that mode. If I use the "home screen", the clock and OAT are in the upper right.
- wished there were hardware switches for the heated seats. I usually have to turn them on myself via the LCD.
- still don't like the lack of % SoC display and having just the 20 battery bars + GOM. Yes, it's in their slow to respond app. It's about as slow as NissanConnect to respond to queries.
I've still been driving the Leaf for some of my commute to avoid having my Bolt warranty expire by mileage so I haven't really been able to test the range that much. Between Friday and Monday morning, I'd done over 114 miles and still had over 40% battery left. Quite a bit of it was at highway speeds w/heater on w/little attempt to go slow and conserve energy. Part of the weekend involved me going to Redwood City (over 31 miles away, almost all highway). If I did the round trip in my Leaf, I'd arrive home w/almost 0 juice. I took a side trip on the way back. No problem.
I do like all the gadgets I have (e.g. follow distance display, collision warning, blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic alert, etc.) But, I'm annoyed there seems to be only a single trip odometer and it's tied to the miles/kWh screen. On Leaf, there were at least 3 trip odometers and the miles/kWh displays (there were two) weren't tied to the trip odometers.
One thing that concerns me is the Big Brotherish element of OnStar. They have this "Chevrolet Smart Driver" thing (https://my.chevrolet.com/learnAbout/onstar-smart-driver) that gives you a recap of your trips including the locations you stopped at, had hard accelerations at, etc. I disabled that via https://my.chevrolet.com/onstar/settings several different times but it seems to get re-enabled. (I need to look into this more.) Even after disabling, there's no guarantee that location data isn't being transmitted.
When I have time, I'm going to look into seeing whether pulling the OnStar fuse really kills the mic on-board the car, rendering phone calls and Siri useless (don't want that). Otherwise, I'm going to look for ways to disable the GPS (e.g. disconnecting the GPS antenna, if possible) or trying to opt out of all location transmissions.
Edmunds in their long-term Bolt review has complained about windshield reflections due to their light colored dash. They recommend getting as dark a dash as possible. I did w/the dark galvanized gray interior.
Hope this doesn't come across as overly negative. I so far have no regrets. The range is incredible vs. my 11 bar '13 Leaf. I really like the better acceleration. The gadgets (e.g. safety features + CarPlay) are nice and the Bose stereo is comparable to the Bose stereo in my Leaf.