The Chevrolet Bolt EV was the first affordable long-range EV on the market, arriving in late 2016 with 250 miles of range and a modest MSRP (meeting or beating the subsequent Tesla Model 3 on all three points). As one of the lowest price EVs out there, beat on price only by the technically inferior Nissan Leaf, it was immediately a popular EV choice and GM sold about 150,000 units until it was discontinued in late 2023.
The major issue with the Chevy Bolt was with the battery. GM had partnered with Korean firm LG to produce the Bolt’s battery, and after a couple years of production they could see that the battery pack was exhibiting problems. For the entire life of the Bolt program, GM was having to deal with these problems, but with such a huge owner community, the problems and solutions are now well documented, especially at this fantastic Reddit “wiki” page that documents:
In short, initially GM swapped out the batteries on all of the early model years, and eventually developed more sophisticated software that allowed the car to detect whether it had a failing battery, so that they did not necessarily have to do the battery swap in later years.
The Bolt EV was offered in the “LT” (basic) and “Premier” (premium) trim levels, with an additional medium-grade trim “2LT” offered in later production years. For the last two years, Chevy also offered a somewhat larger version of the car called the “Bolt EUV”.
The exact options that a particular car was equipped with (at the factory) can be found via a VIN decoder, a website where you enter the VIN of the car you are interested in, and it returns a list of the installed options. The excellent Reddit wiki page (already mentioned above) has a section farther down called “Options and Trim Levels” that points you to some VIN decoder sites, and details some key option codes to look for.
These U.S. catalog PDFs from GM (available via archive.org) list all of the standard equipment, options, trim levels, and packages in painstaking detail.
The first option to always check for is DC Fast Charging; this feature was optional for most of the production life of the Bolt. As described in the Reddit page above, the DCFC option is visible on VIN reports as option code “CBT”. You can also confirm visually by looking at (or getting a photo of) the charge port, which has the two extra pins and (probably) an orange flap to cover them if it does have DCFC option, and just a blank black oval if it doesn’t (as seen here). Without DCFC, any EV is useful only as a metro-area vehicle, which maybe is fine for you but you are so close to having a fully functional car, one that can also do long roadtrips. The roadtrips will be on the slow side, due to the Bolt’s relatively slow 50 kW charging capability, but they will be doable … as long as you have that DCFC option.
Other option codes to look for will indicate whether the car has certain useful features such as adaptive cruise control (aka ACC) or a premium sound system, typically as part of an “options package” with names like “Driver Convenience II package” or “Infotainment Package”. All of these are summarized in the Reddit page linked above, and laboriously detailed in the GM PDFs linked above.
See the top-level “used EVs” page here for general advice on battery health, warranty transferability, and why you should care about options in the first place.