G.M. Puts $41,000 Price Tag on the Volt (If you had the money, would you buy?)

New York Times ^ | 07/27/2010 | Nick Bunkley

[SeekAndFind]

DETROIT — The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in car capable of driving about 40 miles at a time on battery power without using any gasoline, will have a sticker price of $41,000 before a $7,500 federal tax credit, General Motors said Tuesday.

G.M. will also lease the Volt for $350 a month in the hopes of attracting consumers who want lower monthly payments or would hesitate to buy the vehicle until they are more comfortable with its technology.

The carmaker has begun taking orders for the Volt, using the Web site to direct consumers to a participating dealer. Dealers in selected states, including California, New York and Michigan, are scheduled to begin receiving the vehicle in November.

G.M. had kept the Volt’s price a secret since introducing the model as a concept more than three years ago, though executives had hinted that it would cost about $40,000. The price is considerably more than the Nissan Leaf, a pure electric car that goes on sale for $32,780 in December, but G.M. insists the Volt is a better value.

“You can drive it cross country, and our competition can’t do that,” Joel Ewanick, G.M.’s vice president for United States marketing, said. Nissan’s Leaf is expected to have a range of about 100 miles on a battery charge. The Volt has a small gasoline engine — which will require premium fuel, G.M. said Tuesday — that will give the car a total range of about 340 miles and allow drivers to fill up at a gas station if they cannot immediately charge the battery.

Both G.M. and Nissan are counting on the government’s $7,500 tax credit for plug-in cars to go a long way toward making their vehicles more affordable.

[Red Badger]

NO!...........

[A message]

Not a chance in .... 0bama’s final resting spot.

If I was buying a car right now it would be a Ford Focus at 35MPG starting at around $16,000.

I had a 2010 Focus on rental back in December. The giddy up and maneuverability along with the interior set up was outstanding.

Best car I drove all year.

[SeekAndFind]

Who, in their right mind, in this economy, would spend that money on that !??

Someone with Al Gore's money??? Now I'd like to see if he actually puts his money where his mouth is.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

40 miles wouldn’t even get me to work every day.

[keepitreal]

Twice as much for the purchase of an electric car, and here in Colorado, we now have two-tier electricity pricing in the summer (anything over bare minimum electricity use is billed at a higher rate), so twice as much to buy the car and twice as much to power the car to go 40 miles at a time. No thanks.

[nascarnation]

Now we taxpayers not only get to fund 52 year old UAW retirees at 3 grand a month pension and silver plated bennnies, but pay a $7500 subsidy for each one of the cars the UAW members build.

[WOBBLY BOB]

Are the batteries warrantied to survive Minnesota winters
and is GM no longer run by the gubermint?

[Red Badger]

The company has said it does not expect to earn a profit from early generations of the vehicle.

Then why build it?.......Oh, I forgot. GOVERNMENT MOTORS........

[Non-Sequitur]

(If you had the money, would you buy?)

Hell no.

[RavenATB]

Damned expensive way to express your narcissism.

[Grumpybutt]

And furthermore - our kiddo in Afghanistan wired $6000 a couple months ago with instructions to find and buy him a car so #1 he wouldn't blow the $$, and #2 when he came home on leave he would have something to drive...... When you are dealing in flat out cash, you can get a pretty good deal - we drove off the lot with a 2001 Pontiac Bonneville fully loaded with leather, sunroof, only 80,000 miles, and all the extra's for that $6000 cash. And when he came home on leave (went back this past Sunday) he loved the car - put 1500 miles on it over the two weeks he was home.

Ok, I'll shut up now. LOL

[downtownconservative]

I hate to break it to you, but when these things start to stack up in inventory and GM has to practically give them away to move them, you will be paying for them...you just won’t have to drive one.

[FrankR]

ReVOLT against the VOLT!

As a matter of fact, REVOLT against GM and Chrysler...period.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Its never a good idea to be the first to buy a new model.

Let them work out the kinks first....

---

I gather no true rich enviro believers are going to line up to buy the Volt when it comes out ( the same way people queued for blocks at midnight when the iPhone first debut ).

[Disambiguator]

That’s what I call sticker shock.

[central_va]

Actually it isn't that expensice to recharege. At 12 cents a kilowatt hour the calculation might work like this:

220V X 10Amps = 2200 Watts = 2.2 KW .12cents/hour 6 hours = $1.54 cents to recharge. This is half the cost of gasoline. This assumes a 6 hour recharge.

[who knows what evil?]

...so how much would this GM POS er, Volt cost after electricity costs “necessarily skyrocket” under cap and trade?

[brytlea]

Didn’t you know? Electricity is magically produced by the electric company!

[nascarnation]

I’ll stick with my 2002 Z-28 convertible.

I just changed the clutch in one of those for a buddy. Man it was one of the hardest auto jobs I've ever done. No room to work on anything.

[Wilderness Conservative]

Wait till all these hybrids and Volt’s batteries need to be replaced. There will be a lot of sticker shocked car owners. Count on seeing them for sale by the 1000s