“Insight: GM's Volt: The ugly math of low sales, high costs”

[jody]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/10/us-generalmotors-autos-volt-idUSBRE88904J20120910

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.
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GM's basic problem is that "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced," said Dennis Virag, president of the Michigan-based Automotive Consulting Group.

And in a sign that there may be a wider market problem, Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi have been struggling to sell their electric and hybrid vehicles, though Toyota's Prius models have been in increasing demand.

Just the latest example of government committee failure to manage corporations that produce consumer goods!

Can GM succeed only if a government prohibits Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi, and Toyota from selling their products that allow a consumer to choose what she/he prefers?

[Robb]

1. You forgot to throw in something about the lazy union workers.

Other than that, solid effort.

[Ian David]

4. +1000 n/t

[tammywammy]

7. +10000 n/t

[onehandle]

11. +100000 n/t

[uponit7771]

17. +1!

[JRLeft]

2. The Volt is a great vehicle it is superior to the Japanese versions but it needs to cost half as

much.

[snappyturtle]

3. Drudge is featuring this article today too. hmmmm........

[get the red out]

5. If something isn't affordable a person will buy what is

There's no way I could afford a Volt in my wildest dreams when I was car shopping last year, but I wanted to go toward using less gas and I could afford a Honda Insight. The time before that, years ago, when I was looking for another car, the Insight was still as ugly as sin to cost so much and there ways NO WAY I could afford a Prius. Prices for gas hybrids have come down, thankfully. I hope that prices for the plug ins will come down as well.

There is also the problem of where someone charges it. We live in a townhouse so charging would have been an issue even if it wasn't totally out of our price range. I'm sure for many people in apartments and condos that is an issue. Generally, over time, these issues seem to get worked out though. I wouldn't be surprized if GM didn't manage to work out the issues with the Volt.

[onehandle]

6. Let Them Die!

sheesh...

I bought a Chevy last year. Not a Volt, but it's the best car I've ever owned, and I drove Hondas for twenty years.

[godai]

8. apples and oranges...

Leaf is EV...Volt is hybrid. There's a market for both. These were never expected to be instant mass sellers. Cost is an issue for many people. I'm leasing a Leaf and am very satisfied with it, for all local travel. Zero emissions and no gas, ever!

[librechik]

9. If this were China, the govt would aubsidize this like crazy--maybe half the cost

and support no interest loans to consumers to buy in. Also start putting up infrastructure (charging stations) etc like crazy. But we enjoy shooting ourselves in the foot because the guy with the ideas that work is "the enemy"

we are so stupid and fucked.

[godai]

12. There is a $7500 federal tax credit which lowers cost. n/t

[librechik]

18. umm, yeah--down to $33000!

IMO, the one percent (2-5%?) who can afford this car should donate the subsidy to clean energy.

No. I mean a SERIOUS program. Designed so that ordinary folks can buy it and pay what other new cars in the low to mid budget cost.

[still_one]

10. I find it interesting all these stories coming out about how cost prohibitive the Volt is. I should

point out these so-called experts also said the same things about the Prius, which incidently, has a premium price compared to a non-hybrid version, and it took a few years for Toyota to break even. I remember how they made fun of that also.

Yes, the Volt has a premium price today, however, that always happens with new technology.

In addition, I suspect these stories are coming out now as a backhanded way to dis the GM bailout.

What they fail to report is that the Volt is NOT the main source of revenue for GM. It is a start to try to free us from gasoline dependence.

[godai]

13. Well said. n/t

[My Pet Goat]

14. Volt Sales Surge

Sales momentum, especially in California.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57505016-92/the-chevy-volt-dead-or-alive/

[One_Life_To_Give]

15. Actually it $20-$32,000 to produce a Volt

The rest of the cost is the Non-Recurring Engineering costs and tooling charges divided by sales volume to date.

The actual cost to build the Volt is estimated to be an additional $20,000 to $32,000 per vehicle, according to Munro and the other industry consultants.

If GM targeted all NRE costs to be amortized over 18 months of sales then it's a bad investment. But technologies like that rarely pay back so quickly. Should be calculated on atleast 3-5yrs. Like to see how the Mazda RX6 (Wankel Engine), the Toyota Prius and the original Honda Insight compared on only 18mo ROI calculations.

[KansDem]

16. Horseshit!

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)

Probably the most alarming thing about this story of how the electric car was literally destroyed is what it reveals about the power of corporations to control our lives. Film maker Chris Paine, himself an EV1 owner, makes it clear that it was big corporations, especially big oil, and most especially General Motors itself, that woke up one day and asked themselves the multi-billion dollar question: Is an economical and efficient electric vehicle really good for business? In the case of the oil companies, obviously not since such a vehicle would not be burning any gas or needing any motor oil. In the case of the car manufacturers themselves, especially GM, which actually spent some very serious bucks on developing the EV1, the answer came as a bit of a surprise. First of all, they asked themselves, in the long run are you going to make more money building small efficient vehicles or behemoths like the Hummer? It didn't take long for them to figure out that the profit margins would be higher with the bigger vehicles. And then they realized that with the EV1 they wouldn't be able to sell many of their combustion-engine parts like oil filters and such. Furthermore, the EV1 was built to comply with California law. Doing some more thinking, GM realized that it would never do to allow some state government to tell them what to manufacture. If things worked out in California, before you know it, the whole nation might very well go plug-in.

So, as shown so vividly in this documentary, the car manufactures and the oil companies bought up or scared enough politicians so that the law requiring zero emissions in California went the way of the dodo. Meanwhile GM, which had been leasing the EV1, recalled them all and literally destroyed them. Paine has some nice footage showing the brand new and near brand new cars being crushed while EV1 lovers protested in vain. Nationally of course we know about the bills congress passed allowing truck-sized vehicles to continue to guzzle gas (mostly SUVs) and how 6,000-pound vehicles were given massive tax breaks for small business owners (mostly anybody but a wage earner).

There is of course plenty of controversy about whether the story presented by Paine (narration by Martin Sheen, by the way) is fair and accurate. I did a little research--there is a ton of information on the Web--and what became obvious after not too long was that the electric car not only is a viable alternative to the combustion engine car but really is the wave of the future whether General Motors and the other car manufacturers know it or not. For now, however, they are not about to change their ways. They have too much of a vested interest in business as it is.

The hydrogen fuel cell red herring is addressed, and, with help from Joseph J. Romm, who wrote The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate (2004), which I highly recommend, got fed to the dogs. Naturally there is a clip of George W. Bush pretending to support the hydrogen fuel cell car, even though I am sure he knows that economically it's not even close to a match for the electric car. Getting the Great Prevaricator to advance the propaganda put out by the oil and vehicle companies surely is something close to proof positive that it's BS.

Especially watchable is the clip from Huell Howser's PBS show in which we get to see the EV1s not only being crushed but pulverized into little bits for recycling.

There was a demand for electric cars; there was a list of drivers wanting one!