Posted on 12/03/2012 10:22:33 AM PST by jazusamo
Albert Einstein is credited with having defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Well, prepare for more insanity as General Motors is doubling down on green energy and plug-in cars after the disappointing sales results from previous entries into the field. The politically-motivated hype that we saw, and continue to see, on the Chevy Volt will be repeated. This time the over-hyped vehicle will be a Korean-made, all-electric Chevy Spark.
The misrepresentations from GM and the media on the Spark EV (electric vehicle) are already starting with headlines on stories ( like this one from Bloomberg) boasting that the car will start at a price tag of under $25,000. Not exactly. For some strange reason, the price of the new Spark EV and the Chevy Volt are now being quoted after tax incentives. It is also interesting to note that Bloomberg quotes the competing Nissan Leaf price before tax incentives. Here is the important fact that proponents of plug-in EVs fail to grasp. THE COST OF A SUBSIDIZED VEHICLE IS NOT LOWERED BY TAX INCENTIVES; IT IS ONLY BORNE BY OTHERS.
The new Spark EV will start at around $32,000, not under $25,000 as reported. Taxpayers will pay to reimburse buyers of the vehicle (who will probably have above average income) $7,500 through federal tax credits. The Spark will compete with the Nissan Leaf, which starts at around $35,000 and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, which starts at around $29,000. All of these cars are all-electric vehicles with electric ranges from around 70 miles to a yet undisclosed range for the Spark which will likely be closer to a 90 to a 100 mile range. The Leaf and i-MiEV have been utter failures, but that isn't stopping GM from building a new vehicle to compete with them.
The Leaf has been selling at a rate of fewer than 1,000 per month , less than half of its goal. The i-MiEV has been doing even worse. The plug-in Chevy Volt has been doing slightly better than the Leaf and i-MiEV with sales spurred by incentivized leases from government-owned Ally Financial . In addition, the Volt loses money for taxpayers and GM shareholders with every vehicle sold and the sales figures will fall far short of early GM goals. And now we will spend taxpayer money on the electric Spark to create green jobs in South Korea.
To put the EV sales figures in perspective, GM sells close to 20,000 Chevy Cruzes each month compared to average sales of the plug-ins of about a thousand or two. So why in the world is GM pushing a new plug-in EV Spark to compete in a segment that has minimal demand? The answer must be that political goals rather than economic ones are driving decisions at a company whose management team has been appointed by President Obama. The government continues to refuse to sell its investment stake in GM and, judging from the insane Spark EV focus, seems to have a say in how the company is being run.
Another way to look at the logic, or lack thereof, of the Spark EV is to compare it to the gasoline-powered Spark. The plug-in version cost about $20,000 more than the gasoline one. Of that, $7,500 will be reimbursed to buyers of the EV from all taxpaying Americans. The average motorist drives about 15,000 miles per year. The Spark EV will use no gas, thus saving about 430 gallons of fuel versus the gas-powered Spark which gets about 35 miles per gallon. So the average driver can save about $1,700 a year in gas driving about 15,000 miles a year assuming $4 a gallon gas. Subtract the electric cost for charging the EV version, which at $2 a day will be about $700. Think about this, the average driver in America will save about $1,000 a year in gas costs for an additional $20,000 spent on the electric Spark. Taxpayers pay $7,500 in federal EV subsidies (plus state credits) on each vehicle sold so that these savings can be realized. It will take about 20 years to recoup the extra money spent on the electric Spark. Is this making sense to anyone other than ideologues?
I'm sure GM and the media will not let the facts get in the way of the hype. The gas savings will be misrepresented, just as the price has already been, with the amount of gas saved inflated and put in terms ofsupertanker fulls or craploads or some other such nonsense. Sales can be spurred to promote the hoax by having taxpayer-owned Ally Financial take the hit on lease deals that make the vehicle affordable to some while the taxpayers pay through the back door. More hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will be lost on the tax subsidies on the vehicles. And all so that a government-owned and managed company can try to convince the masses that plug-in cars and green energy are the answers to America's energy needs, despite the clear evidence to the contrary as displayed by failures like the Leaf and i-MiEV. That is pitiful.
Mark Modica is an NLPC Associate Fellow.
Excellent post. Also it needs to be said that electrics are MANDATED in Crazyfornia. If you don’t sell some electrics, you can’t sell any cars at all.
And Crazyfornia is too large a market to spurn.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/01/environmentalists-laud-californias-electric-car-mandate-/1#.UL0RfXdkiSk
And it’s ugly to boot!
Your arguments sound logical, but you're using them to pitch government-subsidized non-competitive electric vehicular schemes.
Looks like the defunct Pontiac Aztech design team found a new home. Nothing like dusting off a failed marketing design and then slapping it onto a failed marketing propulsion system. That’s progress?
Goobermint Motors
We do it all to you!
Ingenious—another coal-powered car!
Which is good, right? American resource produced by Americans.
1. The Chevy Volt is a gas engine-electric battery hybrid so that if the trip becomes too long for the battery's state of charge, the gas engine kicks-in to recharge the batteries as one drives. The Spark is all batteries so what happens when your battery runs down on the road?
2. The Volt's battery pack is built by A123 Systems that is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. [There has been news that Johnson Controls, Inc. is negotiating to buy A123 Systems, but nothing is final.] Is (was) the Spark battery built by the same firm? What happens when the battery packs need replacing? Will spares (new or re-manufactured) be available and at what cost.
3, Why would anyone design a car that's powered by coal? Obama is closing down coal fired power plants (needed to charge your car batteries) and coal mines that provide their product to the power plant?
4. Is this whole Green Car hype a scam by people who want to impress their friens how socially “with it” they are?
So you are saying the 70,000 American lives that air pollution takes yearly are unimportant, not to mention lives in the rest of the world. Too sad.
I am not at all advocating the government force people to pay for this with tax incentives. Rather, like any other crime, people that kill people must pay a price. Bible law tells us how to handle that. If current electricity and travel costs actually factored in the cost to human lives there would be no need for incentives. The cost would be so ridiculously high from lawsuit settlements, that alternative clean energy would look really cheap. But I understand, you would rather have a little bit sheaper energy and kill people, right?
Actually the combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal can easily take care of all our needs, at very low cost.
The gov’t built a nuclear powered car back in the 1950’s, today the technology is far more advanced. We could have nuclear powered cars that are as secure as the black box on an airplane. Those can crash from 50,ooo feet at speeds a car can’t approach, and still be fine.
Electric powered vehicles charged by renewable energy also make sense.
The problem is that what is in the best interest of the population is not always in the best interest of freedom. This is a difficult situation. Most people think it is good that we have traffic laws for example. I like to know that when I go through a green light that it is very unlikely that anyone is going to be ignoring the red light going in the perpendicular direction. Personally, I prefer freedom. I would rather leave most of the “laws” as guidelines for the courts. The guy in NH recently that drove on the highway at very high speeds at 2am? in the morning to get his wife, who was in labor, to the hospital on time, committed no crime in my opinion. To me the cop who ticketed him at the hospital when he finally stopped is the criminal.
In some cases the balance between safety and freedom is clearer than others. I prefer freedom. But that is all the more reason for me to argue on a post like this to put aside the ignorance of the true costs in safety, of a recklessly polluting pattern of greedy behavior, in favor of a cleaner safer world. Because I would rather not have the government mandate it, I would rather have you embrace smart Christian stewardship.
If you are going to pull numbers out of dark places, might as well say 70,000,000 American lives are "taken" by air pollution each year...
Where did you hear that?
On the internet...
Hydrogen and stupidity; the most abundant things in the universe.
You haven't figured out yet that there is no such thing?
There are cloned A123 cells right now, although there is no problem procuring the genuine article nor is that anticipated. Unclear if future A123 cells will come from South Korea production or from the Michigan factories. If someone wanted to use cloned cells, an integrator would have to package them in drop-in form for the Volt, or replace individual cells in the battery cases. At this point it is felt that the cloned cells are not of the same quality but this may change in the future.
I don’t think the lithium-ion battery is a smart move. There are known issues [battery fires] with them in laptop computers, the Volt and, now, on the Boeing 787. The 787 has had several battery fires and the fleet has been grounded until the reason is found. I’m not an engineer, but I know trouble when I see it.
The A123 type is safe or as safe as any battery. The Lithium Cobalt Dioxide (LiCoO2) chemistry in the Dreamliner, however, is much more prone to high-temperature incidents but is higher performance as well.
OK. Why do they catch fire?
It is certainly the case that any li battery of any chemistry can catch fire if shorted internally due to physical impact, or shorted externally or severely overcharged (not easy to do that with an A123). Many, many cases of SLA automotive batteries exploding are on record as well. I personally had a Nicad battery overheat and burn insulation once; none of them are immune to problems.
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