GM Negotiates Rights To ‘Bolt’ Name With Yamaha
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Despite plenty of buzz and confusion as to whether someone was referring to the Bolt or the Volt, General Motors is set on bringing the Chevrolet Bolt concept to market without changing its name. But there’s one problem: Yamaha currently holds rights to the Bolt name for motorcycles and related parts, causing GM’s trademark application to be suspended.
However, GM has had an agreement with Yamaha from 2014 to use the Bolt name and, once it supplied the appropriate documents to the USPTO, the suspension was rescinded, allowing the trademark application to continue moving through the USPTO system.
According to Annalisa Bluhm from Chevrolet Communications, the “Chevrolet Legal team has been working closely with the USPT on the Chevrolet Bolt trademark. Our legal staff received consent from Yamaha to use the Bolt name. According to our legal team and the USPT website, our USPT application is back to active status”.
We should note that on May 27th, General Motors filed two new trademark applications with the USPTO for the terms Bolt EV and Chevrolet Bolt EV. As such, it could be possible that the final, go-to-market name of the Chevy Bolt Concept could be Chevrolet Bolt (as per the original, suspended and now-active trademark application) or Chevrolet Bolt EV (as per the newly-filed trademark applications).
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And now you know why so many cars have numbers for names now.
This is a very time consuming and expensive process to find, approve and get legal rights to a name. The cost per name can run in the tens of thousands of dollars to secure an they always have to have more than one name per car ready for issues such as this.
Tesla Motors has the same problem trying to use the Model 3, since Ford had a Model 3 in its list of names. TM finally calls it Model III.
I prefer the Chevrolet Bolt EV to identify its “Electric Vehicle” nature in the name. Next time, GM should use the “Chevy Screw”.
Presumably the Chevy Screw (TM) would be a station wagon or conversion van.