GM to reveal Chevrolet Bolt, a 200-mile electric car for $30,000

In a surprise move, General Motors will reveal on Monday plans to build an electric car called the Chevrolet Bolt in two years — one that can travel 200 miles on a full charge, and cost roughly $30,000, a direct challenge to the plans of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors.

As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, GM will unveil the Bolt concept Monday at the Detroit auto show, with an eye towards starting production in 2017. As envisioned, the car would compete head-on with the forthcoming Tesla Model 3, which Musk has said would target similar specs and timing, and the Bolt would be sold nationwide — a significant expansion of GM's electric-car efforts. While the automaker will reveal a new version of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid on Monday as well, its only current pure electric car, the small Chevrolet Spark, is sold in California and Oregon only, and sales totaled all of 1,145 for 2014, according to HybridCars.com.

GM executives have said in the past that the company was working on a 200-mile EV, a standard that could overcome "range anxiety" among mainstream customers. While low gas prices have hurt sales of efficient vehicles overall, electric-car sales grew in 2014, thanks mostly to federal and state government incentives; sales of the Nissan Leaf rose by a third this year to 30,200 in the United States.

Meanwhile, Tesla has been forced to delay the launch of its new SUV, the Model X, until later this year, and has launched construction of a massive battery plant in Nevada that could in theory supply up to 500,000 vehicles a year.  GM already owns a battery pack assembly plant in Michigan that builds parts for the Volt and other vehicles, and has a supply contract with South Korea's LG Chem from another Michigan plant for battery cells, a factory that has never run near capacity.

Yet other automakers, notably Toyota and Honda, have moved away from pure electric vehicles, saying the limits of battery technology simply won't be surmountable for cars in the near term. Both have turned toward hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles, with Toyota's Mirai revealed last year, and Honda set to show a new version of its FCX car on Monday as well.