"For the first five months of this year, GM has sold only 7,157 of what it prefers to call an extended-range electric vehicle, or E-REV. May sales, in particular, fell 4.3 percent, to 1,607. By comparison, the overall U.S. automotive market was up 8.2 percent for the month.
According to a report by Inside EVs, Chevy dealers have more than
9,000 Volts clogging inventories, vehicles they need to clear out before the 2014 models start rolling in."
"Industry analysts have estimated it actually costs GM as much as $75,000 to build each Volt, or nearly twice the base price."
"Chevrolet?s first attempt at a true hybrid vehicle isn?t going so well, and the company is boosting incentives just to get the cars rolling off of dealership lots. It turns out that Chevrolet has way too many Volts lying around, mostly due to the fact that Chevrolet is churning them off of the assembly line, but no one is buying them."
"According to The Detroit News, Chevrolet spokeswoman Michelle Malcho said that GM has a 140-day supply of Chevy Volts, which is double the amount that many analysts say is ?healthy,? and even then, 70 days worth of inventory is still on the high side to some car dealerships. Obviously, this isn?t a good sign for the Volt.
To try and get the hybrid cars rolling off the lots, Chevrolet has dropped the price of the 2012 models by $5,000, and $4,000 for the
2013 models in order to make room for the 2014 models. This means you?ll be able to grab a 2012 Volt for a $39,995 base price, supplemented by up to $7,500 in tax credit and a new $5,000 incentive."
"Chevrolet?s first attempt at a true hybrid vehicle isn?t going so well, and the company is boosting incentives just to get the cars rolling off of dealership lots. It turns out that Chevrolet has way too many Volts lying around, mostly due to the fact that Chevrolet is churning them off of the assembly line, but no one is buying them."
"According to The Detroit News, Chevrolet spokeswoman Michelle Malcho said that GM has a 140-day supply of Chevy Volts, which is double the amount that many analysts say is ?healthy,? and even then, 70 days worth of inventory is still on the high side to some car dealerships. Obviously, this isn?t a good sign for the Volt.
To try and get the hybrid cars rolling off the lots, Chevrolet has dropped the price of the 2012 models by $5,000, and $4,000 for the
2013 models in order to make room for the 2014 models. This means you?ll be able to grab a 2012 Volt for a $39,995 base price, supplemented by up to $7,500 in tax credit and a new $5,000 incentive."
===========================================
2014 is when Gen 2 comes out?? Wasn't there sumpn where the Gen 2 will be $10K cheaper?? And better? Proly will still have planetary gears, tho.... lol If people are hip to THAT price drop, I don't think many people will bite now. Even at another $5k off, the pruis is still a much more economical overall commuter car.
I'm def'ly ripe for the Gen 2, but by then mebbe the Volt will have some less complexified competition. Or mebbe I'll just get a Leaf with a Honder generator tucked in the back.... lol
At $10K cheaper, KiddingHisSelf will be able to buy 24 of them, or some shit. Lookee, Mommy, I'm passing all these gas stations in all different colors.....
Sorry, that's incompatible with Bonkers' and EA's hilarious obsessions. I think your dig about the lawnmower deck on the Aptera really sent Bonkers into overdrive, and EA can't resist throwing in his one cent.
Hopefully the Gen 2 will take off. GM did an admirable science project, proly should get a prize. Now it's time to make it practical -- as I described to you earlier -- by addressing "true usage intent".
The bottom line nitty gritty is a Leaf with a built-in backup "anti-strandedness" Honder generator. Heh, no planetary fukngears, no clutches, no nuthin ceptin a fukn switch. Beyond the reading and general comprehension level of KiddingCan'tGetLaid, of course, but, hey, there it is.
If Nissan gets hip to this nitty gritty, the Volt will be dead. Too bad, cuz GM was on the right track, and had they not been obsessed with engineering-for-engineering's sake, they could have done the Leaf-with-a-genset ditty, and proly no one could touch them. Cuz, well, they woulda had mebbe $100 mil in R&D, not $1-2 BILLION.
They can still make an over-priced convertible model for assholes like Kidding. Lookee, Mommy, I'm passing gas stations with my hair (or what's left of it) blowing in the bloatvolt wind.....
"They can still make an over-priced convertible model for assholes like Kidding."
I'm sure a Cadillac dealer would be happy to give KiddingNoOne a $10,000 trade-in for the overpriced, overweight Chevy Volt he got suckered into buying if the Cadillac ELR ever comes out:
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KiddingNoOne can then brag on Usenet how smart he is, how well off he is, and how he couldn't resist upgrading to an even better "investment". ;>)
It's not a marketplace that I follow, but my impression is that GM took a shot at a market that's between a rock and a hard place. It's too expensive to compete with family sedans, and too inexpensive to compete with exotics.
At $70,000+, the Tesla S is selling above projections -- over 4,700 in Q1, but watch out for "sales" that are just dealer inventory. Anyway, Musk is a smart dude and he built an exotic market niche before he built the sedan. The roadster, which really is a Lotus Elise with an electric motor and over 5,000 Li-ion cells, is 'way cool and goes like hell. So when he put the sedan on the market, he had the cachet he bought from Lotus but which rubs off on the Tesla S sedan. He learned his marketing lesson from Jaguar's experience 60 years ago.
(Tesla Roadster)
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(Lotus Elise)
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So he can sell an exotic sedan and catch the rich people who want to be the first on their block with something very cool -- no Chevies for them, nosirree. In terms of cost efficiency, the thing makes absolutely no sense at all.
Meantime, the much cheaper Toyota Hybrid plug-in goes only 11 miles on battery power. Ford's Fusion Energi goes 21. They're nibbling at the edges of "plug-in" capability. The volt goes 40 miles, which is in a different category -- lots more commuters will be in range.
But it's at a bad price point: too much or too little. And Chevy doesn't have the kind of cachet that Tesla has, so they have to go down.
That's going to be tough to do. They could do what Toyota and Ford have done -- charge less for much less capability. Or maybe they have another engineering idea, one that doesn't include three prime movers under one hood.
BTW, weight is not the hangup. The Volt's curb weight is 3,780 lb. The Tesla S is 4,647 lb and it hasn't seemed to hurt them. Even the Nissan Leaf, which, like the Tesla, has no IC engine, and is quite small, weighs 3,300 lb. The state of the technology apparently doesn't give you a lot of choice, if you want to build a conventional sedan with a lot of battery power.
As you can see from the figures above, it won't be much of a weight-saver, by the time you add up the engine, transmission, and generator/alternator. Whether it would save much money is an open question.
The big picture, IMO, is that all of the car manufacturers dabbling with the various electric configurations are shooting at moving targets. As consumers, we have little or no experience with these things, and we don't know what we want. Meantime, the technology evolves, and we don't know when we'll be able to get our dreamed-for electric car.
If you want something now, you have a variety of imperfect choices. But they'll each be right for someone, and when they are, you'll have happy consumers. We appear to have some right now, including one on this NG.
Guilty as charged!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Altho I'm not THAT fond of lobster.... plus filter-fish are fairly contaminated w/ pollutants.
And assholes like Kidding will overpay for a lobster meal just to say, Mommy!!!! Lookeeemeeee, profligately consuming BUTT AGAIN!!!! I'm BETTER than Angst, better than Angst!!!!!!!
No dear, you are stupider than Angst.....
Altho, I could see Kidding getting his lobster meal at Red Lobster, with the rest of the riff-raff.
Oh, Ed, I appreciate your reading alladat.... And notice that I don't use "diesel-electric locomotive... with batteries" anymore.... rather "shitty li'l backup genset, for anti-strandedness".
But really, I gotta find sumpn even simpler, that the self-obsessed assholes like Kidding can grasp.... Right now, the only thing Kidding can grasp -- lit'ly and fig'ly -- is GM's dick.
Find the right analyst and s/he will estimate you anything all the way right up to the point that *you* want to make. What is so incredibly different in Volt from, say, Prius which costs $25,000 (to the customer) and Toyota is making profit on it? Volt has a larger and different technology battery, so it probably costs $3K more. OK, let it be $5K more, but still, what would explain the incredible $50K difference in the alleged estimate?
If the estimate has any relation to reality, it most likely does not take into account economy of scale that hasn't yet started to show since the sales are not very high and the model is relatively recent. Toyota started selling Prius in
1997 and announced making first profit in 2001 after 75,000+ were sold. Gotta give it time, I'm sure GM understands that.
Eisenstein, the reporter of that article Jon quoted, just says "industry analysts say." Although Eisenstein knows what he's talking about, you can do the accounting on this kind of thing in a variety of ways.
In this case, the "analysts" appear to be Sandy Munro, who was quoted in a Reuters article from which Eisenstein likely got his "analyst" quote:
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You can't do accounting that way and get a result that makes any sense. It's good for producing a corporate balance sheet or P&L, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cost of manufacturing a car.
Bob Lutz says the story is nonsense:
"The statement that GM ?loses? over $40K per Volt is preposterous. What the ?analyst? in whom poor Ben Klayman [one of the authors of the Reuter's piece] placed his faith has done is to divide the total development cost and plant investment by the number of Volts produced thus far. That?s like saying that a real estate company that puts up a $10 million building and has rental income of one million the first year is ?losing? 9 million dollars, or several hundred thousand per renter."
GM also released a statement saying something close to that, but it's corporate PR, so take it with a grain of salt.
Doing accounting in the car business is difficult, especially for a new type of vehicle that encountered huge research and development costs. The only reliable thing you can work with is the marginal cost of building the last car, or the next one -- they should be the same. I'm sure that Lutz is well aware of that marginal cost.
Then you have to decide how you're going to amortize the R&D. And that could be something you do over years for tax and stockholder purposes, or a decade or more if you're doing corporate planning.
That all makes sense, which is why Jonny Bonkers will dispute it with non sequiturs. His habit is to become obsessed with attacking something, and the Volt is merely his latest target. It's transparent because many of his criticisms apply to other models, of which he has nothing to say much less continuously starting threads about them by posting one sided attacks. It's just what he does, although his other habit is doing a 180. It's been going on for a long time. Here's a short list of contradictions that someone compiled to demonstrate that Bonkers is not to be taken seriously on any subject.
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Again, just read through these DIRECT quotes from Jon Banquer, and make your own decision about him:
--------------------------------------- "Without a doubt SaladWorks is a complete piece of ****" - Jon Banquer
- May 21, 2006
"I've been away from SolidWorks for almost ten years." - Jon Banquer-
"SolidWorks is consuming every available minute of my learning time right now." - Jon Banquer - Aug 12, 2007
"The program has changed so much in ten years that I'm still way behind where I need to be." - Jon Banquer - Aug. 26, 2007
---------------------------------------- "For the record I like SolidWorks" Jon Banquer April 10, 1998 "I'd hate to be using SolidWorks" -Jon Banquer - Jan 15, 2005
---------------------------------------- "OneCNC looks good." - Jon Banquer - Aug 31 2003 "OneCNC has a good product" - Jon Banquer - May 11 2005 "OneCNC is so bad that it can't be sold" - Jon Banquer - June 30, 2007
---------------------------------------------- "May I remind you that your an anonymous loser who is too chicken **** to post with his own name." - Jon Banquer - Dec 24 2006
Franco Folini UPDATE -- July 8, 2007 -- "Jon didn't respect our agreement, posting comments under fake names."
------------------------------- SolidWorks 2007 Bible "the content is just superb!" - Jon Banquer- Aug
8, 2007
To the author SolidWorks 2007 Bible "I should knock down 200 or so pages this week. Which still won't get me to Multibodies! Just ****ing ridiculous, Matt." - Jon Banquer - Aug 19-2007
----------------------------------- "John Carroll is probably the best thing that has ever happened to U.S. Vero" - Jon Banquer- June 16, 2001
"the type of scumbag that John Carroll is... which is why he can't sell jack ****" - Jon Banquer-
------------------------------------ "You never chain geometry in Gibbs or SmartCAM. It's not necessary." - Jon Banquer - May 20, 2005
>From the SmartCAM Manual "Create the elements in any order, and sequence them later, using modeling tools such as Chain."
-------------------------------------- "I would strongly suggest you buy The SolidWorks Bible. It will give you many insights into how SolidWorks works" - Jon Banquer - Aug 19,
2007
"For all your talk about design intent it's amazing how few examples you actually give in the SolidWorks Bible on design intent. Why is that ****tard?" - Jon Banquer - July 14, 2007
---------------------------------------- "The program is a buggy, overpriced under performing, POS that is a tribute to Bill Gibbs enormous ego" - Jon Banquer -
"Love those GibbsCAM Machining Markers! Great idea" - Jon Banquer -
--------------------------------------------------- "Need I remind you that it's you who is too much of a pussy to say a word to Bill Gibbs on how you really feel about his claims of no chaining." - Jon Banquer - July 15, 2007
"Last time I saw Bill Gibbs at a trade show he almost pissed in his pants... I went out of my way to be polite and not disturb his presentation." - Jon Banquer - Aug 11, 2007
-------------------------------------------------
Wherever the Bonkers' infection manifests, please post this link.
GM understands how to use the US government to f*ck the US taxpayer.
The Chevy Volt will never achieve economy of scale without a total redesign / a major breakthrough in battery technology.
The Chevy Volt is much too heavy and it's way overpriced.
US consumers have rejected the Chevy Volt for damn good reasons and they will continue to reject it. =============================================
Unless GM sells it for $15K..... which it could, the same way inkjet printers are cheaper than the fukn ink.... you are f***ed forever with an inkjet. GM will just make it up on repairs, parts, batteries.... lol And, of course, if GM finds a lodestone of Kidding's, they could actually do pretty well -- assholes are usually pretty oblivious, ergo free with their money.
Tying me to Ed Huntress? Is that supposed to sting? You're getting dumber.
"Ed, The newsgroup badly needs someone who is as articulate as you are. Keep me on my toes and correct me where ever you think it's appropriate,as I respect what you have to say based on what you have already posted. I will certainly take the time to think about whatever correction, advice, etc. you post." - Jon Banquer - Jun 23, 2002
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"Reading "whoyakidding" nail Gunner on a daily basis on all the lies Gunner has told over many years on Usenet is easily the highlight of this newsgroup for me." Jon Banquer, Jan 2, 2013
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And how ironic that EA has adopted your dopey tactics, including the Bonkers' 180.
"Jon Banquer scurries around a machine shop the way a rodent burrows in a wheat silo. Both have the equivalent parasitic value, except I think I'd prefer rodent droppings in my cereal, than *any* proximity to Jon Banquer." EA, May3, 2009
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"Mebbe a.u.kooks would *want* the ever-inept Jon Banquer, as one of their own.... Is there an alt.usenet.incompetents?" EA, May 4, 2009
Yeah, he could have done that in less time than he's wasted here. But build something rather than obsess about others being too stupid to build what he wants? LOL What are you going to suggest next, that Bonkers get a job doing CAD CAM? :)
Ironic math: 3300 pound Leaf + 400 pound genset trailer = how much more than 2000 pounds?
Some people move on, you can't, virtually by definition of being a stalker. You STILL can't grok that I think the Volt is a good car, that has complexedly strategized itself into near-failure.
You can't grok strategy, intent at all, being a mono-minded narcissist. Study hard. Contact Sylvan learning centers asap.
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