Chevy Volt Meets High Resistance, GM Suspends Sales 599
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill reports that GM has announced to employees at one of its facilities that it is suspending production of the Chevy Volt for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees. Back when GM launched the beleaguered electric car, it boldly targeted sales of 10,000 in 2011 and 60,000 in 2012 but GM only sold 7,671 Volts in 2011 and just 1,626 so far this year. 'We needed to maintain proper inventory and make sure that we continued to meet market demand,' says GM spokesman Chris Lee. 'We see positive trends, but we needed to make this market adjustment.' Although President Obama promised he would buy a Volt 'five years from now, when I'm not president anymore,' the Volt has come under criticism from Republicans in Congress because of reports of its batteries catching on fire during testing. Ironically, the shutdown comes as gas prices are soaring, exactly the time when an electric car should be an easy sell." If it's still true that GM was taking a loss on every Volt sold, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.
A Joke (Score:5, Informative)
The Volt costs $40,000 before tax rebates and only gets you 35 miles on an electric charge. Then 35 MPG city/40 hwy (gas) for 375 miles.
The Toyota Prius starts at $24,000 and goes to $30,000 for their top end. Mileage is 51 MPG city/48 hwy for approximately 600 miles.
So Chevrolet's market was people who have lots of money, are willing to spend it with abandon, want a car, but don't really need to drive much. In short, semi-rich idiot hipsters.
I think they probably just saturated their customer base.
HAHA, this is so hilarious! (Score:2, Informative)
if they had continue with the EV1 they would have been the world leader in electric cars by now.
stupid americans.
Re:Japan and Europe is where the industry is (Score:5, Informative)
Aren't Fords made in the US ?
The ford focus is quite a nice and fairly popular car.
As far as I know, the mk1 Focus was developed/built in Europe in 1998, and then Ford US built it in 2000, too, with some changes. The mk2 Focus was developed independently in Europe/US (US model was very different from Europe model and only a restyled mk1). The mk3 Focus was a joint development between Ford US and Europe, and is built both in US and Europe. So the Focus is not really a good example of a good car developed solely in the US.
Re:Japan and Europe is where the industry is (Score:5, Informative)
That's good enough for me to call it American.
Re:A Joke (Score:3, Informative)
Didn't we have an article here recently about the impact of innumeracy?
The problem with the Volt / Prius comparison is that it's not that simple. You've got to factor in operation costs. The Volt costs $0.90 less per mile to run on electric mode than the Prius. When the gasoline engine kicks in, the Volt costs $0.80 *more* per mile.
So the more affordable choice depends on what your transportation needs. Let's start somebody who is a ridiculously ideal Volt candidate. She uses her car to commute and run errands around town. She runs the car 30 miles / day on average and never goes over the limit. That works out to $9855 savings annually. She's well into the money within two years, not even counting any tax rebates.
Now let's suppose every weekend our Volt owner drives to grandma's house to deliver a basket of goodies. Grandma lives 153.5 miles away, so our Volt owner drives 35 miles on electric, 118.5 on gas. She stays over night and does an identical return trip, so she's drive a total of 237 miles on gas, at a marginal cost of and additional 189.5 for the entire weekend round trip relative to the Prius. Over the course of 52 weeks, that adds up $9859 in additional operating costs, almost exactly canceling out her electric savings, so the Volt represents $10K-$16K out of her pocket she'll never see again.
And how about Grandma? Well she only uses her car to drive to church on Sunday, and it's a mile each way, so it really doesn't matter *what* she drives. She's better off sticking with her 1980 Plymouth Volare sedan that the nice man downtown keeps running, even though the beast only gets 18 mpg.
Re:A Joke (Score:5, Informative)
I work out of two offices, my primary one which is a 36 mile commute, and another regional office, which is an 84 mile commute. Generally I go to my primary office 4 days a week. In cold weather, I'm on the gas engine maybe 2 to 3 miles, but if it's warm I'm electric all the way. I'm on gas for about 44 miles on the longer commute.
I'm getting around 109mpg. Since early December, I've bought around $60 in gas. It's hard to tell due to the mild winter, but I think my electric bill has gone up around $25/mo.
Sure, I could have bought a cheaper car, and I'll never save enough in gas (well, unless Iran destabilizes the middle East and we end up with $10/gal gas) to recover my cost, but I actually like driving the Volt. It's not a sports car, but it's not sluggish either. 0-60 is 9.2 seconds, but the instant torque from the electric engine makes it feel much faster. In "Sport" mode, it does 0-30 in 3.0 seconds.
And it's made by Americans who seem to have figured out how to make a car that's as fun as any import I've owned. GM has plenty of problems, but maybe some of the cool Volt engineering will seep into their other cars.
Re:EV1 lovers are MIA (Score:5, Informative)
While Volts sit in dealer's lots gathering dust,
I went to the local GM dealer, and while they had one, they said it wasn't for sale. And if I wanted to buy one I'd be put on almost a year long waiting list. He basically said they were near impossible to get so dont bother right now.
Re:make them look pretty (Score:4, Informative)
the only reason the Tesla got any attention at all was because it looked like a sporty Lotus!,
had it looked like the current crop of retarded looking square boxes and it wouldn't of batted an eyelid.
That is because the roadster is just a Lotus Elise with batteries and electric motors.
Re:Slashdot Suspending Editing (Score:4, Informative)
The Volt is not really a "38k" vehicle in standard vehicle terms of quality and fit and finish, it's a $20k vehicle with $18k batteries. For comparison, the Chevrolet Cruze, a non-electric car which is built on the same platform as the Volt, is a 20k vehicle.
You can lease a Cruze under similar terms as the Volt for $200/month less. So, yes, if you're spending $200 on gas and the electricity in your house is free, you pretty much break even. If you choose to buy instead of lease, $200/month over 36 months is comparable to the difference in depreciation between a 38K car and a 20K car. So you break even there too.
Either way, you have to drive at least 20k miles/year to spend ~$200/month in gas for it to be financially worthwhile to go with the Volt. And you're not driving a car of any better quality or fit and finish than a Cruze.
Re:Simpler than that (Score:4, Informative)
Hybrids are all the rage. But they really aren't that green. Batteries use metals that can be difficult to obtain and energy intensive to produce. They take far too long to recharge. And then they don't last. Pure electric would be the way to go if we had decent batteries, by which I mean batteries that approach the convenience of the humble gas tank. So we have this hybrid approach which uses both gas and electricity in combination. And it still needs a bit of battery capacity. All the expense, trouble and weight of both kinds of drive in one package!
As if battery troubles aren't bad enough, a conventional gas powered direct drive vehicle is quite capable of beating the fuel economy of a hybrid. There's lots of low hanging fruit that manufacturers are still ignoring. They are finally improving transmissions, putting in more gears and dumping that huge, huge waste of gas known as the torque converter. Took them long enough, and there's plenty more. Aerodynamics could so easily be much better. Instant on/off for the gas engine would save big time, and erase the one big advantage hybrids do have: the better city fuel economy. Put up with bad batteries, and then not even get better fuel economy?!
There's so much hybrid misinformation and hate out there...
The NiMH batteries are highly recyclable and are very reliable (my hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery). Yes, a car that you plan to keep for 20 years is likely to need a battery replacement; these are often taken from totaled vehicles at a significantly reduced cost compared to a new battery, and total costs are no more expensive than the expected maintenance for a non-hybrid of similar age.
Plug-in hybrids are great, because you can charge them whenever you have the opportunity, but you don't need to. The Prius plug-in can be recharged in under 3 hours from a regular 120V outlet, or in 90 minutes from a 240-volt outlet. And if you can't recharge, you still get 50 mpg. Obviously, plug-ins with a longer range need longer to recharge. Pure EVs are good for some people, but not all. They're often a reasonable choice for a family's second car, so they still have one car that can be used for road trips. Alternately, some people realize that the frequency of needing to drive 100+ miles at a time is low enough that they can just rent a car.
If a conventional commercial gas vehicle can beat a commercial hybrid, why don't they? Instant on/off is a start, sure, but doesn't buy a huge amount of fuel economy. It also requires a beefier 12V battery and a bigger alternator/starter motor. On a hybrid, there doesn't have to be a separate alternator/starter motor; it can just use the same electric motor it uses for propulsion. And city economy isn't just bad because of idling; a huge amount of energy is wasted in braking. How often do you accelerate from a red light, just in time to hit the next red light? In my area, because the lights are not timed, that happens to me all the time. Timing the lights to each other would help, but is impossible to do on every street. Most cities do it on one or two major roads (I've heard all of San Francisco has only 6 timed streets). So any time you brake, you're wasting huge amounts of energy, unless you can recover that somehow. That's what hybrids do.
Hybrids aren't perfect, but given today's technology, they're often one of the better choices. When the day comes that vehicles can all drive themselves (and be programmed to do so efficiently, and communicate with each other), it would be very possible to make a conventional vehicle that meets the current economy of hybrids, and we can revisit this topic.
Re:Slashdot Suspending Editing (Score:4, Informative)
It's a credit, not a deduction, so you get the $7500 regardless. Take my word as someone who bought a Leaf and is in the process of filling out the tax forms.