GM offers big price cut on Chevy Volt

[PoliticAverse]

18. Will A $5,000 Price Cut Recharge Volt Sales? Sort Of.

GM made the unofficial official today, cutting the price of the 2014 Chevrolet Volt to $34,995 — $5,000 less than the 2013 model. What they didn’t say was, “We sort of did that a few months ago, but without shouting it from the rooftops, it didn’t have the effect we hoped for.” So now the secret is out. And if history is a guide, it should help, although perhaps not dramatically.

But it’s one thing for that to be true and another for everyone to know it. Chevy has been back advertising their lease special on the car for a couple of months. It sold 23,461 Volts last year, but looking at the August-October period when the lease deal was in full force and extrapolating that over a year, the car would’ve moved closer to 35,000 units. While neither figure is breathtaking, the latter would’ve put the Volt near the top 100 rather than in 127th place on the list of cars tracked by GoodCarBadCar.Net.

Chevy’s problem, though, is that the Volt is simply too expensive, especially early in the year when a buyer might face a wait of nearly 18 months before receiving their $7,500 tax credit with the following year’s refund. And without lease support, 2013 sales barely ran ahead of 2012 until June, when the discounting came back, along with a more visible television presence. And it seemed to work, with June sales of 2,298, nearly 1,000 more than the prior year. But July lacked follow through; year-to-date sales are now barely above 2012′s, and that forced GM’s hand.

Read the rest at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/08/06/will-a-5000-price-cut-recharge-volt-sales-sort-of/