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Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L), Mar 2, 2012.

Page 165 of 243
  1. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    OK, assuming it's refundable, that's $115 million in revenues.

    Yeah, plunking down an advance payment on a car reminds me of the early 1980s when people who pay to get on waiting lists for lots of Japanese cars.
     
    doctorquant, Apr 1, 2016
    #1969
  2. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    People paid to get on waiting lists for Japanese cars in the 1980s? Not saying it didn't happen, just that I don't remember it happening.
     
    cranberry, Apr 1, 2016
    #1970
  3. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Yep. Lots of popular models were sold before they even got here, and there were strict limits on dealerships with regard to quantities, scheduled deliveries, etc. Rick Hendrick (of Hendrick Motorsports) got popped for mail fraud for bribing Honda executives to work around those limits.
     
    doctorquant, Apr 1, 2016
    #1971
  4. RevPastor

    RevPastor Member

    The tech they have is very good. A coworker was looking into one of the new vehicles.

    I look at the deposit similar to how I saw my neighbor plunk down about $800 for the Skully helmet over a year prior to its creation. The thing is just really damn impressive. Getting in early is a bit of a risk but you also get it for less money...
     
    RevPastor, Apr 1, 2016
    #1972
  5. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    The people who actually end up with these cars have discretionary income to try to be the first to get the new cool toy. Letting Tesla sit on $1,000 is not a big deal for a lot of people.

    That part doesn't boggle my mind that much.

    There are things that have me laughing endlessly -- and have for a while. First, Tesla sells every Model S at a loss. There is no way it can produce a car that is close to being as cool as the Model S at a fraction of the price and do it profitably. I suspect (and this is what happened with the Model S when *it* was supposed to be the mass market vehicle), people who do take delivery will be paying a heck of a lot more than $35K per car. With the Model S, the base price was somewhere around $70k. The typical person was paying more than $100K.

    Then, there is a fact that rarely gets reported in all of the breathless hype. The quality of the Model S that have been delivered have been poor. As much as everyone loves the car out of the box-- and early on, it got killer reviews--there have been all kinds of issues relatively early in the life of the car --particularly, 2/3 of the drivetrain units have had to be replaced. The one that Edmunds bought has needed it replaced twice. It's not as big a deal as it should be, because many of the people buying the Model S aren't buying it as their mode of transportation. It's a toy -- it's a 4th or 5th car for many.

    But it should make anyone wonder. Tesla has missed every deadline Musk has set, in terms of delivering actual cars. But even with that and the relatively small number of cars they have actually been able to produce, there have been quality control issues. Why would anyone expect them to be able to ramp up production, and actually improve quality? It usually works the opposite way. On top of it, if they really can turn this into a mass market vehicle, where they produce and sell more units, the typical person who really relies on their car is not going to have patience with something that expensive having breakdown problems.

    Then, there is just the silliness of the company itself. It not only doesn't produce the cars it actually produces profitably, the only reason it doesn't lose more money than it does on each vehicle is that its vehicles are subsidized by things like dollar-for-dollar tax credits to its end buyer and a regulatory scheme that transfers millions of dollars from other manufacturers to Tesla. It adds to up to thousands of dollars per car they sell. And even with that, I am not sure there has ever been a company that has bled cash on as grand of a scale as this one is -- just to produce a relatively small amount of product. Musk is going to need to raise more money soon -- maybe the credit markets will indulge him yet again, because of the upside-down credit-bubble world that made Tesla even a possibility in the first place. Although, credit conditions are tightening, and if he goes about it the same way he did last time in the secondary equity market, the institutional money has been becoming more discriminatory about valuations recently -- it may be harder.

    Even if he does raise more money, no one using their head thinks that can continue indefinitely. The company is already at more than $2 billion dollars in debt and climbing. In a normal world, in which its rate of interest was commensurate with the risk, the spigots would not only already have been turned off, it wouldn't even be able to make the interest payments on the immense amount of debt it has already compiled.
     
    The Big Ragu, Apr 1, 2016
    #1973
    murphyc likes this.
  6. murphyc

    murphyc Well-Known Member

    Also reminds me of when Chevrolet announced it was bringing back the Monte Carlo name for 1995. Based on nostalgia, something like 40,000 people (probably at least half of whom wanted a black one with a '3' on it) put down orders for the car. Never mind it wasn't a rear-wheel-drive V-8 coupe like the old one had been, but instead a reworked front-wheel-drive Lumina coupe with a V-6.
     
    murphyc, Apr 1, 2016
    #1974
  7. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Sheet metal sells, baby ... [/NASCAR]
     
    doctorquant, Apr 1, 2016
    #1975
  8. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    I bought one exactly like this in 1985. It was awesome until I totaled it.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Apr 1, 2016
    cranberry, Apr 1, 2016
    #1976
    TigerVols, murphyc and YankeeFan like this.
  9. murphyc

    murphyc Well-Known Member

    Ragu, to follow up on a couple of the great points you bring up...
    The mention of the fraction of a price vs. what you get reminds me of the Chevy Corvette. Since the C4 came out in 1983, the Corvette has offered most of the performance of exotics at a fraction of the cost. That's still true today. But for that to happen at that price, it's inevitable corners have to be cut somewhere. Hence the bad quality stigma of the Corvette.
    In terms of quality of a new product, conventional wisdom is to avoid the first year of a new or extensively reworked car design. Despite testing of prototypes, there are bugs that don't get caught. This was especially true in the 1980s for domestics, with GM being the biggest culprit, but it's still a pretty sound rule of thumb to go by. Buying a totally new car from a totally new car company would ramp up the risk factor quite a bit, one would assume.
     
    murphyc, Apr 1, 2016
    #1977
  10. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    In that period there was the Monte Carlo, and the Cutlass Supreme, and the Buck Grand National, but I'll be damned if I can remember the Pontiac version of that car. Can you?

    And, here's kind of a cool NASCAR sidetrack. In 1988, I covered my first, and only, Daytona 500. That was the year that Tim Richmond was trying to make a comeback and NASCAR was having none of it. He didn't have a ride, but had they let him back he would have driven Ken Ragan's Ford Thunderbird in the Bud Pole Shootout. Anyway, while all of that was getting sorted out I did a little piece on Ragan. He told me how he'd always wanted to drive a racecar but never had been able to get anything worked out. One day he and his brother-in-law were taking care of the kids while their wives were out and saw that there was an auction going on, so they loaded up the kids and went. A raced-up Monte Carlo (of that generation) went for something like $3,000, and Ragan's brother-in-law said something to the effect of, "I've heard you and heard you, now here's your chance, so buy it or shut up." So, Ragan bought it from the auction winner. A couple of months later he took his first spin around Talladega in it, and on his first lap he clocked in at around 190.

    OK, back to disputes over crony capitalism.
     
    doctorquant, Apr 1, 2016
    #1978
    Iron_chet likes this.
  11. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    He must have been a hell of a mechanic to get the thing up to 190 mph right?

    I didn't realize there was a Pontiac version. I was a reporter in Hartford at the time and as part of a story I got to ride around in an unmarked Grand National with a state trooper one night while he picked off speeders and other bad drivers on I-91. They were bad ass.
     
    Last edited: Apr 1, 2016
    cranberry, Apr 1, 2016
    #1979
  12. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Looks like a Grand Pre or a Grand Am
     
    micropolitan guy, Apr 1, 2016
    #1980
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