Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

I'm really curious. Those v-12 engines in those cars typically get ridiculously bad gas mileage because the engines require so much fuel. Maybe I missed it in the article, but how far can you actually drive that thing before you have to be plugging it in and / or adding more gasoline?

FYI, I usually don't bother posting Chevy Volt news anymore, but here goes. ... the Chevy Volt sales for February were pitiful again. After only selling 1140 of them in January (way off the numbers from when they were essentially giving away the cars and calling them sales to try to create a false impression heading into the election; and even then the numbers were pituful), they sold only 1626 of them last month. If you go to Google news, though, you get the typical cheerleading for the car, rather than any honest stories about what is going on. You get all these odd "green" blogs with names like "Clean Technica" and "EV Obsession" and "PlugInCars.com" basically spinning everything into a success -- almost word-for-word from the GM press releases. So the line now is that sales are up 59 percent (month over month compared to the pitiful sales from February 2012).

It was ridiculous in the case of the Nissan Leaf, because they are trumpeting that sales are up 37 percent -- they sold 653 Nissan Leafs in February versus 478 in February 2012. If they had sold one in February 2012 and then sold two in February 2013, the headline would be, "Sales up 100 percent!"

What is even more funny about this, is a few days before those same blogs were reprinting some GM PR about how the company intends to boost production of the car by 20 percent. And the stories are so effusive. Very few, acknowledge that the 36,000 cars they are talking about aren't even close to the 60,000 car sales they were projecting two years ago. And of course, at the pace they sold the cars in January and February, they are not selling 36,000 cars. They are on pace to sell less than 17,000 cars in the U.S. this year, at this pace, and they barely sell any of them in Europe.

Which means that if the demand for the car continues at this pace, they are going to have to shut down the plant again at some point.

And of course, there is still this: http://www.mlive.com/auto/index.ssf/2012/09/gm_offers_big_discounts_to_boo.html

Last year, that was exactly what was happening. They closed the plant, sales lagged the promises. But in the heat of the campaign, rather than letting it look like failure this has been, they started discounting the cars -- on top of the discounting that is already inherent in the price. According to that AP story, and others, it costs $60,000 to $75,000 to manufacture each of the cars. They sell the thing for $40K. So GM is undoubtedly losing money on every one, and will be for a while, because at these piddly sales they are not coming close to recouping development costs. If they start discounting again, they could be losing as much as $30K on each one, as they likely were at points last year (and that doesn't include the $7500 that we all supplement through the tax credit).

At what point are people going to acknowledge that the cheerleading for this thing, and the propaganda that tries to spin every failure as a success, is Kafkaesque?

 

Thanks. I really should have read more carefully. I thought it was a plug-in hybrid. Is 15 mpg enough of a pick-up from the hybrid technology to make it anything more than a curiosity? I don't know enough about those types of luxury v-12s. But don't they very often get in the 12 to 15 mpg range with just gasoline running through the motor?

 

Yeah. Logically, that makes sense. Nobody buying that is thinking about how many miles per gallon it gets. So why bother with the hybrid engine, then -- especially if the hybrid engine doesn't have a huge effect?

 

Pretty much at the heart of what started this thread: http://blogs.wSportsJournalists.com/speakeasy/2013/03/08/tesla-earns-40-million-selling-pollution-credits/

Tesla Motors, in addition to the $465 million leg up it got from our Federal government gets various pollution credits from state governments.

When Tesla filed its 10-K (late, by the way, which is usually for problematic reasons, but in this case seemed not to be -- still, what does Tesla ever do right?) last week, it showed that it has been selling its accumulated pollution credits to other car companies. In fact, Tesla is very low on cash -- it has blown through a ridiculous amount. And with no actual product that meets consumer demand bringing in enough revenue. ... well, there are pollution credits that they can sell.

So here you have a company that has only been able to operate this long by living off the public dole, and at the same time, it hasn't produced anything to derive significant revenue. 10 percent of its revenue last year was from selling pollution credits. Other car companies are buying them because states like California are mandating that a certain percentage of their cars sold have to emit zero pollutants. They can either give away cars at a loss that satisfy California to be able to sell cars that meet demand and earn them a profit. Or they can buy the credits from Tesla, which is getting yet another gift at public expense.

All of this hurts everyone. It drives up prices. And it just gets into issues of fairness. I'd happily take $500 million at public expense that others don't get, blow through it. ... and then make my best-selling product, "Federal, I-felated-a-lawmaker-paper-certificates" that other companies need to operate without being harassed. Being a business can't be too hard when you get those kinds of advantages and everyone else has to walk around with lead weights.