Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Welcome to the world of the 47 %

When it came to the lease I think that Justin found that the dealers wanted to pocket most of the tax credit on a lease and not pass on to buyer in form of lower lease payment.

 

Justin gave us his numbers. A weeks worth of driving of 221 miles cost him 12.06.

He projected that the same driving in a car that would have gotten him 30 MPG would have cost him $24.82.

Annualized of 52 weeks his 11,500 miles of driving in Volt will cost him $627.

In a car that gets 30 MPG it would have cost him $1290 for the year. By driving Volt he is saving $663 per year.

The deal is bad even with the tax credit. What happens when that ends.

 

Again. One week isn't enough of a sample. He'll do better or he'll do worse on mpg.

And we've never factored in the relative cost to maintain either car.

 

Relative costs could be a real deal breaker if he has to replace the battery on his Volt.

 

You are picking nits off a problem orders of magnitude too large for the nits to make a significant difference.

 

The battery is warranted for 8 years or a 100000 miles.

 

This solution probably sounds a lot like the corn solution that was pitched to farmers in the 1970s.

All oil has to do is drop the price for a couple of years to kill off the upstart product.

 

1) A loaded up Cruze is $27,000, not $23,000. I'm still not sure that includes all the features we got in our Volt. And, having sat in a Cruze, I'm sure it's not nearly as nice.

2) I think USAA's best rate on a new car is 3.something. We're paying 0 percent. Please do - when you're making comparisons - include the $3-4,000 I'm not paying in interest. This was a serious part of our calculus. When I went into the dealer ready to buy, the first thing I had them do was run our credit to confirm we were paying 0 percent. Even if they said 0.1 percent, or 0.5 percent, or 1 percent, we'd have probably walked away and looked at something cheaper.

3) Yes, we bought it, not leased. The super cheap lease was also for super low miles (10,000, IIRC). At that number of miles, I didn't feel like we could drive it enough to make a big enough difference in gas savings.

4) The tax credit is a big incentive. First of all - it's important to note that the credit wasn't written for Volts. We've been giving credits for hybrids and plug-ins since at least 2005 - they were written to expire when a particular model reaches a certain level of production. So unless you've been complaining about credits for hybrids/plug-ins for the last decade, it's a bit disingenuous to do so now.

And moreso, we expected to have a tax bill coming in February that was likely going to get swiped on a credit card. That pending bill is gone now. So we're going to be saving some interest on that, as well.

5) My wife LOVES the car. Loves it. And she's well into another week of basically zero gas usage. Some particulars on her commute: From our house to her work to our babysitter and then back home, it's 30.1 miles. Never on the highway. And any necessary stops (grocery store, pharmacy, school to pick up our oldest, etc.) are all on the way. For the Volt to make sense for us, it took a very particular driving situation. If she had to go on the highway all the time, or if the roundtrip was outside the 40 miles we're getting per charge, we wouldn't have even considered it.

 

But the difference isn't 20,000.

$20,000. Minus the tax credit. Minus (I'll be generous) $3,000 in interest.

Now the difference is less than $10,000. I promise you: Having looked at both in the last two weeks, a base-model Volt is significantly nicer than a base-model Cruze.

 

After tax credit 7000 to10000 is the difference.
it would take 8 to. 10 years to make up difference

 

That's good ... because we drive cars until the wheels fall off. .... and to spend those eight years in a volt that's much nicer than a Cruze will make the wife happy.

And, of course, your math changes the higher gas prices go.