Anyone else find themselves casually perusing General Motors’ third-quarter sales numbers? No? Well if you were flipping through them at the breakfast table, you would’ve seen a funny two-digit number next to the Blazer EV: 19. That’s how many GM made in Q3. Production has picked up for sure, but with still limited supply, dealers are trying to get a bigger slice of the pie through widespread markups.
These aren’t quite the absurd tacked-on “market adjustments” we’ve observed with hot new enthusiast cars. Blazer EVs aren’t getting priced to the moon like electric Hummers, Nissan Z Nismos, or GR Corollas. The increases are still significant and widespread, though. Dealers across the country are typically marking Blazer EVs up by around $5,000, but sometimes as high as $10,000.
Considering that it looks like GM is only currently building the more expensive RS trim, this is bad news. Cheaper 1LT and 2LT cars are seemingly nowhere to be found, which means pretty much any Blazer EV you can get is likely to cost as much as a lower-spec Cadillac Lyriq. At least a lot of Chevy dealers don’t also have a Cadillac store attached to them. Oh, wait.
This, plus a few other factors, are brewing into a storm for GM. Among with other automakers, the Detroit car company is beginning to assess that demand for electric vehicles is not as high as it initially thought it was, at least as far as pickup trucks go. It has likewise struggled to launch most of its new EVs, even without any help from the UAW’s ongoing strike, which could throw an even bigger wrench into the supply crunch at any moment.