Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

I can eat corn. ... and still be intelligent enough to understand that subsidization of the corn industry that is the result of political graft, and takes the form of tariffs on sugar for example (which make sugar twice as expensive in the U.S. as the rest of the world, in an effort to promote high fructose corn syrup domestically), and subsidies that pay farmers not to grow in order to boost the price of corn, hurts us economically and depresses our country's growth, which in turn contributes to unemployment.

I can also eat corn and understand that the mess that type of corruption creates isn't just limited to direct economic consequences, but it has probably had unforeseen social consequences, such as the contribution to obesity that the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup has made, which in turn creates a whole new economic consequence, given how much obesity has contributed to stresses on our health care system.

But to answer the joke post seriously, I don't refuse to eat corn. I just am smart enough to see the negative effect corn subsidies, for example, have had on our economy. Are you?

 

Nope. It was German funding that led to the Prius.

http://aktuell.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pm2012/pm00063.html.en

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/09/12/germany-launches-e36m-research-project-into-li-ion-battery-safety/

{I could come up with 100 more links} -- all that relate to grants related to battery technology. None of those have anything to do with Toyota either (or Volkswagen or BMW, for that matter).

You can convince me easily. Take any of your links, establish the link to the Japanese government mandating hybrid technology somehow, and then tie the link directly to 1993 and what Toyota did with its G21 project or any of the subsequent expenditures and advances in technology it has made in relation to the Prius. If you do that, you can certainly assert that the Japanese government was somehow behind the Prius. Otherwise, you are flooding me with noise. Not evidence of anything, except obscure developmental research programs funded by piddly amounts of money that will mostly never lead to anything commercializable.

Flooding me with every Japanese-related link you can find that relates to battery technology research that has nothing to do with the Prius, doesn't then lead to a logical conclusion that the Prius was the result of Japanese subsidy programs. It's just not a fact. Every reputable telling of the story of the Prius points out that TOYOTA spent more than a billion dollars -- at least -- developing the hybrid technology that led to the Prius -- at a time when no one was focusing on that kind of technology (the early 1990s).

I can find you small government programs that the Swedes have funded with relation to battery technology for a variety of purposes with grants. Most are experimental programs that have not led to, or won't lead to anything commercializable, and most are being funded by relatively piddly amounts of money -- just like the noise on that mess of links you just laid on the thread.

Going through your links, some are just obscure developmental technology abstracts about battery technology that have nothing to do with HEVs or EVs. And most are from 2000 or later. The Prius was already a profitable income generator for Toyota by the time these obscure research projects -- that have nothing to do with the Prius -- were being developed with an eye toward technologies 20 years or longer from now. Most of them are being funded by piddly amounts of money and won't ever lead to anything even remotely commercializable.

Don't tell me that it is perfectly reasonable to assert something and flood me with links that have nothing to do with the Prius. Give me DIRECT evidence that the Prius was the result of government subsidies if you want to assert something that nobody else knows as fact except for you.

Here are links that are to the point:

An interview that explains how Toyota developed the Prius. It is all about Toyota and the steps it took to develop new technologies, not about the Japanese government: http://e2af.com/interview/090304.shtml

Fortune magazine, 2006: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/17/news/companies/mostadmired_fortune_toyota/index.htm Detailed history of the birth of the Prius. Mentions an estimated $1 billion it cost Toyota to develop the technology.

I can give you more, if you'd like.

if I want to put it into the context of the thread, here is a blog post that references a Reuters story that said that GM loses nearly $50K on every Chevy Volt: http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/09/report-gm-loses-nearly-50000-on-every-volt.html In the obligatory response from GM that they are spending up front to spread the cost to future models, it points out that "After all, Toyota spent a reported $10 billion to develop the Prius and its variants through the years." Not the Japanese people, the way GM is spending our money, but Toyota.

 

I somehow missed this. If you ever decide to open a bank, please be my "loan" officer. ... since apparently you don't believe in lending criteria.

We ate $193 million before they froze Fisker's credit line. We ate $535 million that was handed to Solyndra before it went bankrupt. Tesla couldn't meet the terms of its loan, and unlike any other loan I have ever heard of, they didn't call it what it was, a default, but instead summarily reworked it so the company could miss an interest payment last quarter to avoid insolvency. We ate $118.5 million that was handed to Ener1 before it went bankrupt. Am I missing any?

Even if you really want to allow your agenda to pervert this into a "low-interest loan" program, and not bags of money being handed to political cronies who had no qualms about squandering their windfalls, where is the money coming from (don't you need to have earned money, something our Federal government doesn't do, to lend it to someone?) and how are the recipients chosen? Where do I get my "loan" -- if we have a government "loan" program, in the interest of fairness shouldn't it be equally available to everyone? And if it is a true loan program, where is the collateral, the backbone of any loan given from a pawn shop to the biggest commercial bank? What are the lending criteria? Given the default rates, would you agree that there were no lending criteria other than having greased the right politicians? Who had oversight over the chosen recipients?

And most importantly, why the heck would our Federal government -- which is running a trillion dollar annual deficit -- be adding to our accumulated $16.5 trillion in debt by borrowing money that we all pay interest on to give hand-picked entities "loans" that are being defaulted on at a high enough rate that it makes our government look inept in its "lending practices" compared to a small-time loan shark?

 

Justin, I am really glad you are happy with your purchase. As long as you are deriving utility from it, it's all good.

But you are flooding me with your math that I can't verify in any meaningful way, other than to say that every thing you can find about the true costs of hybrids and electric cars relative to their comparable gas models demonstrates that for the typical driver you are talking about years -- and beyond how long most people own a car -- before there is a break even point financially. And it is much worse for the Chevy Volt than it is for certain hybrids, such as the Prius, for example.

I don't know what you paid for your car, but unless you got the car for a third of the $40,000 that the Lundberg Survey used in its March report, as the cost to determine what gas prices would need to be to break even on various hybrids and electric cars, you are not doing better than you could have buying a much cheaper car with similar features. Gas would need to be $12.50 a gallon for the typical driver break even on the deal. The difference between where gas prices are at and that $12.50 a gallon turns into years (decades) before the thing pays itself back. In the link below to the NY Times story about this that got a lot of attention, TrueCar in a similar analysis determined that even just driving a Volt no farther than its battery-only range allows, with gas at $5 a gallon (and gas is averaging $3.45 nationally right now), the payback time for a Volt, rather than having bought a more conventional Chevy Cruze, is 8 years.

That is the reason few people are buying them -- even with the bath the American taxpayer takes on everyone sold that is trying hard to bring the cost down by subsidizing the purchases.

Consumer Reports showed that Volt owners are really satisfied with their purchases, though. So if you feel good about owning one, for whatever reason, as I said, it's all good. But honestly, the utility in buying one of those is not in it being a money saver. It just isn't. Which again, is why don't sell well in a market where people are usually more concerned about their wallet than feeling good about the status of it being an EV.

http://www.ibtimes.com/plug-cars-hybrids-dont-save-money-until-decades-after-purchase-214426

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/business/energy-environment/for-hybrid-and-electric-cars-to-pay-off-owners-must-wait.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

If you think your experience has been so much different than what those analyses suggest, perception is all that matters. For most people, though, there is a different reality, which is why in an actual marketplace, Chevy has invested a lot of money in this thing -- at public expense -- and it is not selling nearly enough of the cars for it to turn into a profitable endeavor anytime soon.