General Motors just did something unprecedented. It brought a car back from the dead—with the promise of killing it again. Today, we're diving into the life, death, and temporary revival of the $29,000 Chevrolet Bolt—the cheapest EV you can buy in America—and how its saga represents a lot that's gone wrong in the new car market is today.

The Bolt was GM's first modern electric car when it was launched in 2017, beating the Tesla Model 3 to production. For a time was the only EV under $50,000 with over 200 miles of range, and owners adored their little oddball hatchbacks. But in 2023, GM announced it was killing the Bolt to focus on building full-size electric pickups and SUVs, part of a massive plan to make an all-EV lineup by 2035.

People were furious . The media (hi) was incredulous. Why would GM just kill a popular, affordable EV with sales at an all-time high? After a few months of heavy criticism, GM reversed course and promised it would find a way to put the Bolt back into production. It was an unprecedented move, but three years and a lot of work later, the car is back, basically the same price, better than ever.

Trouble is, it's a completely different world now. EV sales have plateaued, no one is buying those expensive electric pickups, the federal tax credit is gone, and the Bolt is now the cheapest electric car you can buy in this country. Other automakers are prepping their own affordable EVs to compete. And yet, GM is getting ready to kill the Bolt again in just 18 months.

What is going on here? Joel and Kyle get into it all after Kyle spent a day test-driving the new-old Chevy Bolt and pressing the car's engineering team for answers.

[Thanks to the National Corvette Museum for sponsoring today's episode! Enter here (https://bit.ly/4uBefxU) for your chance to win a '65 Corvette. Entries close April 26, 2026 at 2:00 PM CT. This is your shot – don’t let it pass.]

Stories mentioned in today's episode:

00:00 Intro

04:07 Bolt's rise and fall

12:11 Who killed the Bolt?

24:30 The resurrection

30:16 The new Bolt's promise

43:44 Uncertain future

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Rivian just green lit its own internal performance division, dubbed the Rivian Adventure Department or RAD for short, to move from skunkworks to something larger than one-off passion projects and software development. The usage of the word "yes" landed Rivian here, but now that we have RAD there's a laundry list of questions.

This week, Kyle and Joel break down the history of events that formed RAD as a skunkworks operation to where we are today, what it means, what's to come, and what's realistic. The startup automaker is burning through cash as it inches towards launching the smaller, less expensive, more mainstream R2 electric SUV in the coming months. Will it arrive on time and as promised? And what's Rivian doing to tackle its low its reliability score from Consumer Reports and long service wait times?

Joel spent time with various executives ranging from founder and CEO RJ Scaringe to VP of Engineering and Quality, Brian Gase, along with R1 Chief Engineer Luke Lynch to get answers to burning questions and decipher the past, present, and future.

Stories mentioned in today's episode:

00:00 Intro

7:10 How RAD went from skunkworks to official division

11:13 RAD Tuner

25:43 Liveries, paint colors, and limited edition drops

30:11 The R2

36:56 Will Rivian give us buttons and knobs?

41:05 Rivian's service times, quality, and customer satisfaction

50:10 One more thing!

51:22 Outro

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Jeep is in trouble. The rugged American icon finds itself struggling to dig out from mountain of problems: plummeting quality, skyrocketing prices, and confusing strategic shifts that alienated its most loyal fans. Now, with a new CEO in town, Jeep is trying to smash the reset button.

This week, Kyle and Joel are joined by The Drive’s senior editor and resident truck expert Caleb Jacobs to explain how a company known for trail-rated trucks got lost in the wilderness, whether it can recapture its old-school magic in today’s challenging environment, and if its move to bring back the Jeep Cherokee SUV as Toyota-fighting hybrid crossover is a step in the right direction, or too little too late.

Building and selling new cars at a price that makes sense for consumers is hard enough right now, but Jeep faces an even bigger obstacle: its parent company Stellantis, the multinational conglomerate with 14 brands across multiple continents under its umbrella. Many of Jeep’s biggest stumbles—spending billions to launch a half-finished electric SUV, an ambitious plug-in hybrid push that ended in a rash of battery fires and recalls, raising MSRPs to reposition itself as a luxury brand, and relentless cost cutting to pay for all of that—came from Stellantis’ European focus and top-down decision-making structure. 

To get back on track, Jeep needs to get back to basics, and new CEO Bob Broderdorf is promising a new golden era for the brand that starts with listening to what American buyers actually want from it. Jeep knows mistakes were made. The big question is whether it’s actually capable of doing what’s necessary to correct them.

Stories mentioned in today's episode:

00:00 Intro

3:08 How Jeep lost the trail

17:48 New look Cherokee?

26:18 Grand plans

39:50 Lineup cleanup

57:49 Outro

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No, really. A Tesla Model S just drove itself 3,081 miles from Los Angeles to New York City with zero accidents and zero human intervention for the first time. Was it just another stunt, or a watershed moment for self-driving tech?

Today we're taking you inside the Tesla FSD Cannonball Run, as its organizer and wheelman Alex Roy named it after the famous cross-country speed record challenge. Joel is joined by Alex and The Drive editor Byron Hurd, who broke the news of the run in an exclusive story late last month, to dive into the planning, the challenges, the surprises, and the significance of a car actually driving itself across the US. In the middle of a brutal winter, no less.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology has been a flash point since it launched in limited public beta tests in 2020. Its capabilities on surface streets and highways have since reached incredible heights through successive software updates—but it's also been plagued by unpredictable errors, dangerous glitches, its involvement in multiple fatal crashes, and an ongoing federal probe. Adding to the controversy is Tesla's reliance on cheaper cameras to help the car "see" instead of the lidar-based systems used by other major automakers. Also, despite the name it still requires the driver to look at the road ahead and be ready to take over.

But as Alex and his co-pilots Warren Ahner and Paul Pham showed, for all its faults Tesla FSD is still the most advanced semi-autonomous driving technology on the market today. And while it's taking longer than predicted, the leap from here to an actual self-driving car might be smaller than we think.

00:00 Intro

04:20 Alex Roy has a plan

10:50 How it came together

24:19 Winter is coming

37:15 What it really means for drivers

52:31 Outro

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Ferrari's first electric car is a massive gamble for a company steeped in heritage. So is tapping the designer of the iPhone to create a revolutionary new interior and make a statement about the place of screens in cars today.

This week, the automaker revealed the cabin of the Ferrari Luce designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, the former head of design at Apple, and his partner Marc Newson. It's a retro-modern centerpiece that's very much Ferrari meets the Apple Car: restrained simplicity, aluminum and glass everywhere, lots of squircles, and clever touches like a pivoting center screen that looks like a giant Apple Watch. Critically, there's also an emphasis on physical controls like buttons and toggles for all key functions.

Ive and Newson have never worked on a production car before, so it tracks that the Luce's interior is like nothing else we've seen before. That's by design, because Ferrari can't act like its first EV is just business as usual.

There's a lot on the line, and not just for Ferrari. Ive is very open about how he thinks the auto industry learned the wrong lesson from his work at Apple. Giant screens in cars might feel like "the future," but they aren't the answer to designing a functional interior; in fact, routing critical controls through a screen you can't operate by feel while driving is dangerous.

The unintended consequences of his creations are one of the reasons why Ive left Apple in 2019, and why he and Newson felt compelled to take on the Luce project. So can two legendary designers and automotive outsiders show the car industry the error of its ways?

00:00 Intro

02:49 The Apple Ferrari?

13:08 Steering wheel

19:05 Gauge cluster

24:52 Center screen

28:16 Why glass and aluminum?

33:31 Lessons for the industry

40:12 Ive's regrets about screens

46:11 Outro

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Today we're rolling out The Drive Awards, aka the Slashies, our annual celebration of the very best new cars and trucks on sale right now. We're running through the winners, the losers, the almost-got-it-rights—and we're peeling back the curtain to explain our picks and how exactly The Drive runs a comprehensive car review operation.

Every year, we review well over a hundred new cars and trucks to see if the promises car companies are making actually bear out in the real world. Next, we take the top-scoring models in our six main categories that best represent where the market is today and subject them to a staff-wide debate to make our picks. And finally, we put the winners of each category through one more round of voting to determine who gets the ultimate prize: Car of the Year.

This episode is special for another reason: The Drive's entire editorial team will be joining Joel and Kyle round-robin style as we walk through our thinking and methodology for each category. Get to know these names and voices, because you're going to be hearing from them a lot in the future.

Without further ado, these are your 2026 winners of The Drive Awards, with links to the full stories explaining each pick on thedrive.com.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

03:53 BTS of The Drive Awards

09:47 Best Truck with Joel Feder

17:24 Best Value with Andrew Collins

22:57 Best SUV with Caleb Jacobs

30:17 Best Performance Car with Byron Hurd

37:59 Best EV with Cyril Soliman

45:28 Best Hybrid with Adam Ismail

52:13 Car of the Year with Kyle Cheromcha

01:01:21 Outro

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For our very first episode, we're taking a hard look at Volvo. The Swedish company once known for quirky wagons and safety innovations is in trouble after dumping billions of dollars into an early, all-in bet on electric vehicles five years ago that led to a mess of software issues and production problems, tanking reliability and dragging its global sales to dangerous lows.

Last year, then-CEO Jim Rowan warned of "turbulent" times ahead for Volvo as tariffs scrambled its manufacturing plans—shortly before Volvo's Chinese parent company Geely replaced him with Hakan Samuelsson, who led the company through the boom years of the 2010s before retiring in 2022. Classic move to bring back the old guy.

Samuelsson knows he has to nail this turnaround, and the first car launching under his watch is the Volvo EX60, a midsize electric SUV that represents everything Volvo is trying to get right—new platform, new motor+battery combo, new software stack, new everything. And Joel was on the ground in Sweden for the reveal event last week, where he grilled Samuelsson and the rest of the executive team to find out if Volvo's really learned from its mistakes, or if the company is doomed to repeat them.

Check out all our exclusive stories mentioned in this episode:

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