Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Az, Do you understand this isn't about how long the average commute is? AVERAGES don't matter, because the battery life of that car is not dictated by an average. It is dictated by actual capacity. Once you drain the battery, you can't borrow from the trip before, when you returned home with excess capacity before you recharged.

I drove 160 miles on Friday and 160 miles back on Sunday. 78 percent of those trips would have been gasoline powered in a Chevy Volt, even if I averaged 25 miles a day in my overall driving over the course of a year. Let's say I drive 10 miles a day, 5 days a week, but stretch it out on the weekend to run errands. My average drive doesn't matter, because on the weekends, I own a car I still can't use for more than 25 to 50 miles a day.

The whole conversation started because Justin was trying to convince us that his Volt will break even relative to what he could have bought instead anytime soon because of some enormous cost savings (greater than should be possible, given gasoline costs currently and electric costs) he is achieving anecdotally, and the reason according to him is that he runs entirely on battery power (We never established whether his wife ever turns on radio or the AC or the heated seats). Even if I buy what he said, he still has a car that cost as much as a near-luxury car, and he can't ever drive round-trip to visit his relatives who live 50 miles away, because it will trip over to gas power, and all of a sudden his calculation for when he might break even has him driving the car for the rest of his life. As I said, the conversation got beyond dumb.

And cran, get the Volt to impress your lady friends. If it works for you, as you already know, it works for me!

 

And ANY trip more than 25 to 50 miles puts you into gas power. It's all great if you want to spend $32,500 for a taxpayer subsidized commuter car that can never be used for a longer trip -- that might break even in a decade compared to what else you could have bought for a lot less money. But if you want that, which means never putting it into gas power by using up your charge, don't plan on using your $32,500 car for trips longer than 25 to 50 miles.

I am sure that the typical person who owns a car really drives that way. I can't cite anything that suggests otherwise, after all.

 

Az, You can agree we are going around in circles, right? Even if you rarely drive the thing beyond range. ... the Chevy Volt sells for $40,000. You can get a comparable car for less than $20,000 (the whole "car for idiots" thing everyone got upset about early in this thread). That $40,000 price is heavily subsidized by public debt, which you will acknowledge, right?

For the consumer, like Justin, you can effectively bring the cost down to $32,500 (assuming you earn enough in a year) because on top of the debt that gets tacked onto our national debt thanks to the subsidization of these cars -- i.e. we sell them at a loss, and add the loss onto our national debt -- we also give a tax bribe/credit of $7,500 to people to buy one. According to Truecar, the majority of people pay around $18,000 for a Chevy Cruze. The majority of people pay more than $40,000 for a Chevy Volt. Throw in the government bribe to get people to buy them, and your basic calculation is $32,500 for a Chevy Volt versus $18,000 for a comparably equipped Cruze. You buy one of these and whether or not you keep it within range of the battery most of the time or not, you are immediately $14,500 in the hole. You can almost own two Chevy Cruzes for the price of one Volt. And you are not going to make that $14,500 back during the lifetime of the car -- which depreciates more quickly than other cars anyhow, because the battery is half the cost of the car.

Do you follow the logic here that anyone who buys a Volt is not going to break even on it as a financial decision, due to fuel savings within the likely lifetime of the car? It's the worst deal among plug-ins and hybrids. At least with some of those specialty electric cars that sell for $100K, you are getting a luxury car of some sort that is a conversation piece, and I guess if you have money to burn, owning one could be fun as a toy. If you aren't that wealthy toy collector, you can buy a Toyota Prius C for around $20K to $25K, get a small tax credit that is less than the bribe on the Volt, and get amazing gas mileage, and it could end up breaking even relative to a comparable car within the lifetime of the car.

None of that even acknowledges the really operative thing here, either. ... If you buy the Prius or the comparable gas car, your purchase isn't being subsidized by everyone else, at least beyond a small tax credit for the hybrid. The only reason you are getting that Chevy Volt at $32,500 after your tax credit and all the subsidization, instead of a much higher price, is that our government has added billions to our national debt by pushing these cars. At $40,000 each Volt is sold at a small loss, and none of the billions of dollars in publicly-financed development costs flung around by our government that have gone into the car and future models, are being recouped. On top of it, even though a piddly amount of these things have actually sold in the last two years, they have spent millions on advertising it. For example, Chevy has been boasting that it is outselling the Nissan Leaf. We are talking less than 10,000 cars difference for all of that promotion and advertising. Chevy has spent millions in advertising to achieve that. Even with that advertising, sales have been nonexistant-- when you take away government purchases, fleet sales, and an attempt to boost sales through giveaway leases. It is a $40,000 car. And for a time, you could lease one for less than $300. Show me any other car that costs that much that you can lease for that little. The same crowd that wants to argue for these things, are the types that if Wal-Mart were selling cars that way, would call it "predatory pricing" (which can't corner a market anyhow, even if that is beside the point). They just sell it at MORE of a loss, to try to cover the political embarrassment of it having been a miserable failure. It's all good, though, because the losses this thing is piling onto GM have already been tacked onto our national debt, making it a national problem, and taking away profit incentive from GM, which would give it reason to actually develop cars that people demand.

Why anyone would argue for this is beyond me. It is insane. I would have no problem whatsoever with it generally, except for the fact that our Federal government put *ME* on the hook for this corruption.