Why the New Chevy Bolt Dropped Its Wackiest Feature

The cheerfully cheap Chevy Bolt EV is back, but it’s missing something… Something you can’t quite put your finger on. I’m talking about the steering wheel-mounted regen brake paddle—what else? The 2027 model ditches the old car’s quirkiest feature altogether, and when we asked the Bolt’s Chief Engineer Jeremy Short where it went, he explained that it’s gone for good reason.

“Before, it was kind of born out of necessity,” Short said. “We didn’t have a multi-level one-pedal system at the time. In fact, in 2017—I don’t know if you remember—we had that joystick, you had to shift it to one-pedal every time. And then, we finally got it where you could turn it on and leave it on. But we still only had the one level of regen.

“And during that time, we always had the brakes where if you hit the brake pedal, there would be some percentage of friction and some percentage of regen. And it changed a little bit. Even in adaptive cruise, a lot of adaptive cruise was done with friction hydraulic brakes because of the way it was blended. So the regen on-demand paddle was a way to train our customers to drive efficiently. A lot of people used it to cancel cruise control, but you can also do that with your thumb. So it was a way to drive efficiently and beat the EPA estimates if you were smart enough. But now the brake controller is really good.”

Sometimes, I wonder if efficiency is the enemy of playful innovation. But I digress.

In all reality, I believe a person who buys an affordable EV would rather have this setup. It offers better energy harvesting that results in greater range. Short said that even two-pedal driving is more efficient now than using the old paddle because the Bolt’s friction brakes don’t engage until the regen system is all charged up.

The regen paddle was almost a novelty item compared to the Bolt’s new system. It didn’t feature progressive controls that would allow drivers to dial in how much regen braking they wanted; instead, it was effectively on or off. As Short remembers, it was first introduced on the Volt (with a “V”):

“Even then, it was like, ‘Hey, you only have 38 miles [of range] to play with. Here are all the tools we can give you. Be efficient, my friend.’ But if we took you out and said, ‘Hey, drive this profile and use the regen on-demand paddle,’ you would actually be less efficient than using the brake pedal now.”

Ah, the Volt. How times have changed.

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