The Chevy Jolt isn't real, but Matt Teske really wants it to be. Teske is a marketing and branding consultant for the car industry and an electric vehicle fan. He invented the car and its brilliant spoof website. He owns a Chevy Volt and his wife has a Chevy Spark EV (electric vehicle).
He's a Chevy fan. But he also holds a reservation on a Tesla Model 3, largely it seems, because of Tesla's international Supercharger network. So his creation of the Jolt, and the convincing website that goes with it, is a plea to Chevy to build more electric cars. "If you were to build this idea of mine, the Jolt EV, and develop an EV savvy dealership network that includes DC fast charging, you will get my business instead," he says on the page explaining the site. "Infrastructure and fast charging are a vital component for success."
infrastructure and fast charging are vital to EV success
This might be the most interesting idea Teske posits: use Chevy's nationwide network of dealers as fast-charging stations so Bolt (and Jolt!) owners can travel around the country as easily as Tesla drivers can. The Jolt itself is just an EV-fied version of the Tru 140S Concept, a terribly named, youth-focused coupe introduced at the Detroit Auto Show in 2012. But the attention that the Jolt grabbed, both from us here at The Verge and our auto journalist brethren, as well as folks on social media, shows that Teske is right — there is a thirst for more EV designs, at least in theory.
Chevy's current EV lineup, even with the new Bolt, is pretty staid and practical. That's okay, but at some point we'll need the Ford Mustang of EVs: an affordable and exciting electric car. Will it be the Jolt? Probably not (though it wouldn't surprise us in the least if the name had already come up in some marketing meeting at Chevrolet), but someone is going to have to introduce a $30,000 sporty EV at some point. And the reaction to the Jolt shows that we might be ready for it sooner rather than later.