Really?
Posted on 03/04/2012 5:24:47 PM PST by tobyhill
On Friday, GM announced it was halting production of the Chevrolet Volt until April, so as to maintain “proper inventory levels.” Sales of the electric vehicle have been disappointing, with the company missing its target of 10,000 Volts sold last year. Why hasn’t the car caught on?
GM executives have said the recent frenzy over a Volt battery fire in crash tests has hurt sales. On the merits, the fires weren’t a huge concern — the Volts only caught fire days or weeks after extreme lab testing, and according to a government investigation they’re no more likely to catch fire than gas-powered automobiles. Still, panicky headlines ensued. Conservatives started denouncing the company (Rush Limbaugh called GM “a corporation that’s trying to kill its customers”). And GM needed to retrofit new vehicles. Add that up, and GM sold only 603 Volts in January, down from 1,520 in December.
But the scare over batteries is only a partial explanation. After all, Volt sales rebounded in February to 1,023 vehicles sold, and it looks like the fire scare is slowly subsiding. But neither the pre-panic nor post-panic numbers were anywhere near the rate needed to meet GM’s goal of 45,000 Volt deliveries this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
$25,000 over any other small car like it, all to go only as far as 1 gallon of gas could take it, and fueled by electricity made from coal power plants they want to shutdown in the first place. Some how they call that “green”. I call it dumber than dirt. Liberals always are.
Really?
financed by stolen money=financed ‘with’ stolen money
After N.C. Fire, Duke Energy Advises Customers to Suspend Use of Electric Car Chargers
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/03/blind-spot-the-twilight-of-the-volt/#more-433724
...just two months after Volt sales began trickle in, Obama’s Department of Energy released a still-unrepudiated document, claiming that 505,000 Volts would be sold in the US by 2015 (including 120,000 this year). By making the Volt’s unrealistic sales goals the centerpiece of a plan to put a million plug-in-vehicles on the road, the Obama Administration cemented the Volt’s political cross-branding.
When GM continued to revise its 2012 US sales expectations to the recent (and apparently still wildly-unrealistic) 45,000 units, I asked several high-level GM executives why the DOE didn’t adjust its estimates as well. But rather than definitively re-calibrate the DOE’s expectations, they refused to touch the subject. The government, they implied, could believe what it wanted. Having seen its CEO removed by the President, GM’s timid executive culture was resigned to the Volt’s politicized status, and would never make things awkward for its salesman-in-chief. And even now, with production of the Volt halted for the third time, GM continues to play into the Volt’s politicized narrative: does anyone think it is coincidence that The General waited until three days after the Michigan Republican primary (and a bailout-touting Obama speech) to cut Volt production for the third time?...
Not as many dolts exist to buy O-bum’s Volt as was expected!
Way too expensive, has about enough range to pickup movies at Redbox but not take them back, and it tends to explode.
Other than that, it’s gold Pony Boy, just like you.
Yes, a much bigger engineering budget was spent on it. Yes, a lighter, fancier battery chemistry was employed in it. Yes, it meets modern crash-test and other safety standards.
But for all that, I could buy a 1970 Ford Courier, replace the engine with the motor out of an electric forklift, pack the bed with standard-tech lead-acid batteries (with helper springs added to the rear suspension), and probably get comparable performance.
And have maybe a quarter of the cost invested.
I’m thinking of getting a Leaf after they’ve been out for a while. Even the range on the current model will take care of all of my weekly commuting and errands just using nightly wall plug charges. I drive further out every week or so, and that’s where the gas-powered car comes in.
I’ve run the numbers and it looks equivalent to 100 mpg at today’s gas prices, without the need for oil changes and such.
Now all I need is to buy a PA and go “vroom vroom.”
But Prius is guaranteed sales from liberals that love everything ugly, and without purpose.
Volt needs to be uglier.
With the subsidies being dumped on it, you ARE paying money not to own it.
Mark
we have no where to plug the battery in at our home our garage is not used for parking it is used for storage and our laundry is in the garage so are we supposed to run a
cord outside to our car parked on the street only to have it used by other people who park in front of our house not a good idea.
In California where I live my electric provider PG&E gives you a baseline allotment each month of your kilowatts ours is 338 and we use about 580 each month. They put you on a tiered system from 100-101% of your baseline, 101-130
130-200% and so on each bracket has a different and higher cost the 100-101 was .12 cents a kwh and the 130-200
was .29 cents a kwh. If I had to charge the battery every day it would add about 200 more kwh to my electri bill each month and I would be in the 300% baseline bracket which is even more than I listed above.\
I don't want a car that I can't drive where I want when I want and I don't want a car which would force me to use public transportation because my car does not work for my needs.
Like Soviet planned industries, GM is already dead, with various subterfuges used to animate the corpse with government subsidies. When they end - and they will - GM will enter conventional bankruptcy.
Obama and his friends have a magical idea of science. He probably doesn’t know one end of a test tube from another.
True, that. Also, we are paying some of the costs for the fools who do buy this alleged car.
That stipulated, I would pay even more to not own a Volt. There is no other car away from which I feel this strongly repelled.
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