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The GOM not only learns driver behavior, but also the battery capacity. Your low range may be due to the GOM being unaware of the true capacity of the battery. To help the GOM learn about the battery capacity, try letting the battery SOC dip down real low before charging it again.

 

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At issue here is still the fact that you fill the battery with kWh, not miles. How many miles you get from those kWh depends on all those factors the GOM algorithm looks at. The battery SOC is shown to the nearest 5% with the green bars and to the nearest 1% in the MyChevrolet app.

Small nitpick. It does not show the nearest. It shows the ceiling. So if you have 16 bars SOC, that means 75%-80%. You see this at DCFC all the time... EA will show, say 75% or 76% on its station screen, but your DIC shows 16 bars.

 

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Apologies to those who would condemn me for not wanting a social relationship with my car or wanting to know much about it unless required.

IMO, this is the right way to look at your car! And to some extent I think GM failed with the UI. But I think a lot about EVs will eventually become conventional car wisdom... you know, like the knowledge we take for granted about gas cars (oil changes, octane, etc...).

 

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This will happen when the DCFC infrastructure will be wide spread in the country and most important, reliable. Until then, people should learn what their car tells them so that they don't look like fools stranded on the road 0.5 miles away from the DCFC station. My $0.02

No, I disagree. Every EV has some variant of a GOM. Generations from now, people will come to have some expectations about how GOMs behave.

EDIT: It's funny you mention the "fools" stranded on the road. Two of our most experienced Bolt forum members ended up stranded on the road... because the GOM UI sucks.

 

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Define most experienced. For me, Eric Way is the most experienced Bolt EV driver. And I learned a lot from him, I admit it. In fact he’s the reason I decided to change my Volt for the Bolt EV in 2018, because he showed me what the car can do. I don’t remember him being stranded on the road because of the GOM or anything else.

I drove my Bolt EV for 4 years already in -25C and +35C degrees and NEVER was left stranded on the road. And yes, I like to go 10% SOC or bellow. But it’s true, I know my car and what can it do. I also know what GOM is.

The only situation I would see myself stranded on the road would be because I arrived to a DCFC station that is not functioning. Not because I didn’t read the GOM right. People don't understand that the numbers on the left of the DIC are not everything and that you have all you need in front of your eyes to avoid a situation where you are forced to stop on the road because you have no more electrons in the battery.

These are people (like p7wang) who have been here for a long time and have had their Bolts for years. The irony is that they trusted the GOM a little too much. My take away from those 2 recent posts about the GOM failing them is that the GOM is not to be trusted for low SOC (like 10%).

I'm sure GM and other manufacturers will improve the GOM experience for future drivers. Needing to read a manual and have a sticky thread for something that should be self-explanatory is an indication of a massive failure in UI design. OP's post should not exist IMO. Imagine needing to read a manual to use GUI-based computer software... like Windows or Office. It's unheard of.

 

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Maybe for you, but when I want to use the OFFICE to the full extent of its capabilities, I do read the manual (help). Yes, to use it for writing a text, you don’t need much, you just type. or when you want to add some numbers is pretty simple. But when you want to make functions or choice boxes, well, you start to read the manual. As the GOM is. You use to stop and charge @ 10% SOC or above, you don’t need much, it’s good enough. You want to go lower, well, you need to learn some more about it.

It's more complicated than you car's dashboard gages! Or it's supposed to be! The difference is that Microsoft is a company that knows how to write software and UIs -- so that even a toddler or old person can just pick things up and start using them -- and GM is a car company who can't write software to save themselves.

 

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You chose to compare the two…

Yes... because Microsoft writes more complicated software that requires no manual to use their software. Yet the GOM -- for even basic usage! -- you have to read a manual or a sticky thread or a number of facebook posts or reddit posts or post on chevybolt.org or do some math or watch YouTube to understand why your car is not working the way it should.

 

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You chose to compare the two…

Oh, I see how you read it. You read it the wrong. The GOM is being made more complicated than a word processor.

 

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Thanks GOD for Microsoft writing software, because it helps me being payed big money ! You do know the "don’t panic before reboot", right ?

I know that GM isn't a software company and doesn't do the best job with software. Maybe that will change, but the GOM isn't the greatest example of their UI prowess when so many people are so confused when they hop into this car.

I see now what you are saying. For me the GOM is all you see in the DIC. Not only the numbers in the left. The GOM is also :

• the average number
• the battery gauge (in 5% increments)
• the trend lines

Yet somehow it confuses so many people. Jee... I wonder why. Must be presented to users in the wrong way or something. Guess we better annotate a picture of the DIC and GOM and put a snippet of a driver's manual on the forum.

EDIT: Having participated in MichBolt's thread with suggested GOM designs... it's definitely not an easy UI to design.

 

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GM, IMO, was the smartest of the bunch who made a GOM suited for all kind of people. They are the only company who present an "enhanced" version of GOM, while everyone else is showing only a number and a %SOC.

IMO some people aren’t used to complicated things, so they should use the "Normal" mode: read the number and be done with it. And they should remember that when the battery gauge becomes orange, they should start looking to charge soon.

There are other people who understand the "enhanced" mode. Those should use it to its extent, because it has a lot of information.

BTW, go check the other EV (not BoLT EV) sites and you’ll see why the term "Guess-O-Meter" was invented.

That very well might be true. The other car companies like VW and Ford seem to be worse at software!

This sounds pretty good:

Well, actually, that's exactly how Tesla treats it. When you enter a destination in the navigation it represents the SOC on arrival according to the terrain that will be covered, the projected usage of climate control, the driving style and a number of other factors. Only way you get to destination having deviated from that figure is if you accelerate like a crazy person at every light resulting in excess energy usage (or potentially if you drive to the mountain and encounter a 50 degree drop in temperature). Otherwise I tend to arrive at my destination with a higher % than predicted because I just love beating the computer 😬, and because the prediction on climate usage tends to be on the high side.

From my perspective, it's this type of data that's beneficial to novice EV drivers. It's clear, it's concrete and it leaves very little room for interpretation. I.e. 22% on arrival after a 2hr drive is based on what's ahead of you + data from how you drove prior.

But I've never used it and I've heard you describe it as more limited than Bolt's GOM. So I don't know what to believe w.r.t. to Tesla.

 

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Or maybe it was the 'User Use' that sucked on those times. No amount of displays are going to help a driver that is running close if the driver doesn't act when it's close.
If I'm running close to 'Distance to Destination' (next charger) and what the GOM shows, I'll slow down and turn the heat down. In a moment or two the GOM number will trend to getting better.
If it's still close, slow down more and turn the heat down more.
You just have to start this Slow Down Process soon enough so you don't have to get the Tow Truck of Shame.

These were users like p7wang who have had their Bolts for years.

 

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OK, so you want a car display to show single percentage points, would you also like a decimal point to get an even more accurate number?
And what will you do with that number?

The GOM and the trend lines are an active display of range, with fair accuracy, due the system knowing how you are using the car at the moment.
Having a display show 32.3% SOC doesn't really tell you much...

I want an instrument cluster that doesn't result in frequent posts like OP's. This is not asking for too much... people are going to be renting Bolts in Hertz eventually. Do you think they're going to read the manual to understand WTF the DIC or GOM is doing? No, it should just be self-explanatory like every other gas car out there.

 

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To understand any GOM you need to understand some physics. If everything is fed directly inside your throat you will not learn and understand (this is not directed to you). Of all GOM I've seen and compared I think GM nailed it on the bolt. People lack understanding the basics behind energy consumption

One of the bad things about the Bolt's GOM is that even if you do understand some physics, there are elements of information that contradict each other. If the DIC shows you one efficiency average and the GOM shows you one prediction and you do some math, they don't agree in general. Isn't that ironic? Someone smart enough to do the math and physics calculations can be left just as confused as someone who doesn't know any of the math. It's bad for the super intelligent and the super dumb. Of course, yes... the GOM, infotainment energy statistics and DIC are all separate systems (but you don't know that initially).

 

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I don't know about that because in my experience the GOM was about almost spot on. But since I understand some physics and how to interpret the real time KW usage and the trend line and the green bars I don't care about the GOM estimate middle number. What I can say is that props to GM for including more info on the DIC then few. The KIA EV I drive sometimes is way out of accuracy and there are almost no information on the GOM except for one number. The trend line, the min max, the KW usage in real time is absent in the Kia and I love to have it in the bolt. Now sure it might be somewhat confusing at first and maybe you need to read the manual to clarify some stuff but I feel it is intuitive in general . The discussion started about how to interpret the numbers and the accuracy being off sometimes. There is too many variables to make it 100% accurate on any cars so that is why how ever you decide to make a GOM people will need to understand the basic physics which they didn't care in a ICE car

There is an example on the sticky thread and a brief discussion about the discrepancy before it got locked.

 

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I know where the GOM is on my 2019 Bolt EV; but where is this "DIC" (whatever that means) efficiency average that disagrees? Thank you.

There is an example on the sticky thread and a brief discussion about the discrepancy before it got locked.

 

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The DIC also has its own separate running efficiency average which you can view fiddling with up/down arrows on the steering wheel. This one can also disagree with GOM especially if you don't reset it for a long time. The sticky thread, for example shows 4.3 miles/kWh on the DIC with a 306 mile range prediction GOM. The two disagree... but notice the DIC running average has thousands of miles on it.

 

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@enslay So where is the problem?

Read the thread.

 

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I don't look at average honestly. For me this is a minor glitch and doesn't keep me away of understanding how far I can go with the car

The point is that if you know the math/physics, but you don't know the systems are all separate systems making their own individual measurements, then it's easy to confuse yourself and may mislead you about range or the health of your car's battery. If your car is new, it might even lead you to think your battery is defective... and often is the case, unnecessarily concerned people are doing silly things like measuring battery capacity at DCFC or through math or buying OBD2 adapters to look at cell information... all because of the GOM.

EDIT: There's a blackbox element to this too... the GOM itself... and the battery capacity learning (none of us should need to know this!). Someone had their battery replaced (before recall) and had very low GOM estimates. The advice of an anonymous facebook commenter was to discharge the battery a lot and recharge it to 100% a few times. And that fixed it for this unfortunate user.

 

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Whether you like Tesla or Bolt... and completely independent of Tesla's GOM implementation (which may suck if it strands people!) ... there is an indisputable theoretical advantage of using information along your route. I'm not sure if the Bolt GOM empowered with such information would have saved p7wang and that other poster from being stranded if the SOC isn't precise at the low end of the battery. But it might have if it foresaw some elevation increases (or head winds) on his route home resulting in a different/lower range prediction than the 10-15 miles he saw.

I don't know if Tesla's GOM is a fair comparison to Bolt's GOM. Seems like Tesla's "GOM" is more like something like ABRP. Maybe GM should buy the ABRP company and put the technology in the Bolt and augment Bolt's GOM with ABRP route condition information.

 

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GM leverages Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, so this functionality is built into the MyChevrolet app that runs through those interfaces.

But if it's integrated in the DIC and using all this extra information, you may not need to show drivers Min/Max and trend lines and other measures of uncertainty. If you're more certain about the road ahead, the Bolt's GOM arbitrary +/-18% margin (Min/Max) may theoretically shrink to something more negligible that it might as well not be shown. At the end of the day, less could be more for a simpler UI.