Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Do you have any links that tell us how profitable the car is? Not a planted PR story telling us it is the 133rd best selling car in America (and really that is the boasting point?), but how much of a loss they take on each car sold relative to the other 260 cars they included? Give away leases at a huge loss per vehicle count as sales. Sales don't define success or failure. Profitability does.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2012/09/19/notwithstanding-gms-protests-no-one-wants-the-chevy-volt/

 

Az, The questions anyone who really wants to define success or failure asks: 1) Does BMW or Mercedes or Lincoln sell each of those cars at a loss? Or do they earn a profit on each car sold? 2) Are their sales lower than the Volt because they haven't been under political pressure to create the impression of a success by essentially giving away the cars through heavily subsidized leases?

I don't have profitability figures for any of those cars, or course, but that is the operative question to define whether it is a success or failure. They could sell a million Chevy Volts at a $1.99 each, and as long as the country as a whole is taking a bath of tens of thousands of dollars on each car sold, the sales figures are meaningless. Profitability is what matters. And the only way they have been able to goose their sales figures is to unload the cars at major losses and through heavy subsidization.

Making it even sadder is that they have done it through giveaway leases, as Pat Michaels explained well in that link. When the majority of your "sales" were in the form of leases that heavily subsidize the cost for a loss, it isn't really a sale, as they would have you believe. As Pat pointed out, it's like renting a building and then claiming the person bought it. In this case, you are renting the cars at slum rents just to get anyone to bite.

That hardly defines a success for anyone without rose-colored glasses on.

 

Past Motor Trend Cars of the Year: Chevy Vega and PT Cruiser.

 

When the Volt boosted sales in September and October through leases (apparently renting a car for two years for only $4K to $5K out of pocket counts as a "sale" -- even as it tacks millions onto the country's national debt) news organizations were slobbering all over themselves to write about it.

I predicted this one. ... With the election going to be over before November sales figures were announced, there was no use to try to juice the "sales" figures for a car that makes so little sense that few people will pay an insane cost for one. So away went the giveaway leases. And the number of Volt "sales" dropped in half. Back down to 1,500 of them sold. When someone actually is able to get into the nitty gritty and figure out how many were actually just straight up retail sales, I am certain the number will be a few hundred cars -- since even at the sales peak, when you subtracted the retail leases and fleet sales they sold only about 900 of them in October -- (WITH the car being subsidized by a $7500 bribe that we all pay for that, that is the best this thing can do).

Not surprisingly, the news wasn't filled up with stories about Volt sales the same way it was when they wanted to tout the nonsensical juiced figures to make it seem like people are actually buying the cars, rather than them being given away at huge losses.

Someone pointed out to me the other day, when Bloomberg did its story on the Chevy Spark, they actually quoted the price as less than $25K. Somehow now, the retail price quoted in news stories for these ridiculous Chevy cars now includes the $7500 tax incentive. In the same story, though, they quoted the price of a Nissan Leaf WITHOUT the tax incentive. When I went and looked at the story I was amazed.

Either way, the Spark doesn't cost less than $25K. It costs $32.5K. $7.5K of the cost gets borne by all of us.

This is how much of a miserable failure that car is going to be. ... The gasoline version of the Spark costs less than $13K (starting price $12245). To realize $20,000 in gas savings (more than the cost of the car) from one of those that the EV costs on top of the gas version, the typical person is going to take at least 15 to 20 years of driving around in that little overpriced tin box.

It's why sales of the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV have been so anemic. The cars make no sense. Even with our government-run auto company marketing the hell out of these nonsensical cars (why not; just tack the cost onto the National debt), the marketplace isn't going to magically buy up a car that makes no sense. Even with a $7500 bribe we all pay for, that still leaves the thing way overpriced and dding to our national debt.

What a disaster GM has turned into. ... Chevy overall had flat sales last month, year over year. GM overall had sales up by 3 percent. That is compared to a 15 percent average for ALL cars. Ford sales up 11 percent. Chrysler sales up 14 percent. Toyota sales up 17 percent. Honda sales up 39 percent.

What a bath our country is taking on this corruption. It's too bad it gets so little attention and the attention it does get is skewed by misinformation planted to obscure the truth about what is going on with GM.