(Bloomberg) — General Motors Co. is preparing an advertising blitz as the company resumes production of its Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle in a move to revive sales after recalling every one of them ever made because of rare but destructive battery fires.
GM said it will advertise the Bolt and slightly larger Bolt EUV electric vehicles during every Major League Baseball opening-day game on Thursday to tell consumers that the vehicle is back.
Chevy will spend more advertising the Bolt this year than any vehicle in its lineup except its top seller, the Silverado pickup truck.
One thing GM won’t do with its advertising blitz is talk about the recall of the batteries made by LG Energy Solutions, which is the subject of federal probe for fires in batteries sold by several automakers.
GM prefers to move forward now that it has fixed the battery problems.
“It’s always tricky,” said Steve Majoros, Chevrolet’s marketing director. “We have done a lot of work to understand the broad perception of the situation.
We’re not going to publicly address and come up with some mea culpa. We don’t see broad reputational damage.”
The challenge for GM will be bringing buyers back to the Bolt after a year in which the company had to recall batteries for all 142,000 vehicles that were sold.
The company had told vehicle owners not to park the vehicle inside and, in some cases, keep them 50 feet away from other vehicles.
The Bolt comes back just as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating LG because of fires in the vehicles along with other models made by Stellantis NV, Volkswagen AG, Hyundai Motor Co.
and Mercedes-Benz Group AG.
For its part, GM and LG have said that they found a solution to the problem that caused 13 fires since the car went on sale in late 2016. The recall cost $1.9 billion with LG paying almost all of the bill because the fires were the result of a manufacturing defect in its plants.
The two companies had examined batteries and found that a torn anode tab and a folded separator, which is supposed to keep the anode and cathode from touching, were the cause of the fires.
GM is expecting to have its best-ever year with Bolt and the Bolt EUV, Majoros said.
The plant will be back at high production levels and will have enough batteries and semiconductor chips to get inventory to dealers.
Chevy sold a record 24,800 Bolts in 2021. With the Bolt coming back and the Hummer EV and Cadillac Lyriq in production, GM is working to get its EV ambitions back on track.
“We’re coming on strong with this product,” Majoros said.
“We see record numbers of sales and production for 2022 and we see 2023 being bigger than 2022.”
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