Oh oh! Not Good (GM temporarily suspends Volt production for slow sales)

[MetroMPG]

Something to consider: from what I've seen so far (N=12 ) , all the cars they've been shipping so far have been automatics. They know their market!

When he gets the car, invite him over to let us know what he thinks of it.

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Something to consider: from what I've seen so far (N=12 ) , all the cars they've been shipping so far have been automatics. They know their market!

When he gets the car, invite him over to let us know what he thinks of it.

Its too bad that mericans are incapable of driving stick

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by sendler

That is only because the availability of the Spark is very poor.

Availability of the Volt is also very poor, the people who I've talked to who have them had to first find a dealership that had any to look at, then they were lead out back where the Volt was being kept, not on the show room floor or even in the front lot of the dealership and now people in the local EV club are talking about what dealerships to avoid, because of sales people who are incompetent.

I would bet that most of the cars on the road were part of a production run that was put on hold for a month or two at a time, factories adjust production to fit demand.

[cfg83]

Hello -

Insight: GM's Volt - The ugly math of low sales, high costs - Yahoo! News 2012-09-09

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.
Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.
...
"It wasn't conceived as a way to make tons of money," he said. "It was a big dip in the technology pool for GM. We've learned a boatload of stuff that we're deploying on other models," Parks said. Those include the Cruze and such future cars as the 2014 Cadillac ELR hybrid.
The same risky strategy — gambling on relatively untested technology — drove massive investments by Toyota Motor Corp in the Prius hybrid and Nissan Motor Co in the Leaf electric car.
Toyota said it now makes a profit on the Prius, which was introduced in the United States in 2000 and is now in its third generation. Sales of the Prius hybrid, which comes in four different versions priced as low as $19,745, have almost doubled so far this year to 164,408.
Other such vehicles haven't done nearly as well. Nissan's pure-electric Leaf, which debuted at the same time as the Volt and retails for $36,050, has sold just 4,228 this year, while the Honda Insight, which has the lowest starting price of any hybrid in the U.S. at $19,290, has sales this year of only 4,801. The Mitsubishi i, an even smaller electric car priced from $29,975, is in even worse shape, with only 403 sales.

CarloSW2

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by cfg83

Hello -

Insight: GM's Volt - The ugly math of low sales, high costs - Yahoo! News


CarloSW2

That is the reality of any cutting edge design, payback periods are long at high prices and low demand, especially if the company is not willing to risk lower price full on production.

Right now the automotive industry is reall kinda sluggish, they have a jump every once and a while but in general our economy still sucks and any car is not going to be selling in the way it would prerecession.

[MetroMPG]

FYI: GM has responded to the Reuters story, and they say they made the same basic error as the one reported months back by Fox News (which said each Volt cost well over 100k (closer to 200k?)):

Reuters’ estimate of the current loss per unit for each Volt sold is grossly wrong, in part because the reporters allocated product development costs across the number of Volts sold instead of allocating across the lifetime volume of the program, which is how business operates. The Reuters’ numbers become more wrong with each Volt sold.

GM Response to Reuters Story on Chevrolet Volt Development Costs

[cfg83]

MetroMPG -

Yeah, I noticed the bias, but I wanted the information out there for others to digest. The original Honda Insight was used to prove Honda's hybrid technology and was then re-used across their Accord/Civic/CRZ/Insight II platforms.

CarloSW2

[Frank Lee]

Bernie, Paul, and Ben's piece is correct to include "ugly math" in the title...

[MetroMPG]

Another record month: 2851 Volts sold.

Lots of news reports of steep discounts on lease rates goosing those numbers though.

[MetroMPG]

Another record month: 2961 sold