A controversy has broken out over what it costs General Motors (GM) to
produce a Chevy Volt. A Reuters reporter got things going when he claimed that GM is losing as much as $49,000 on every Volt they sell.
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...
The lack of interest in the car has prevented GM from coming close to its early, optimistic sales projections. Discounted leases as low as $199 a month helped propel Volt sales in August to 2,831, pushing year-to-date sales to 13,500, well below the 40,000 cars that GM originally had hoped to sell in 2012.
Spread out over the 21,500 Volts that GM has sold since the car's introduction in December 2010, the development and tooling costs average just under $56,000 per car. That figure will, of course, come down as more Volts are sold.
The actual cost to build the Volt is estimated to be an additional $20,000 to $32,000 per vehicle, according to Sandy Munro, president of Michigan-based Munro & Associates and the other industry consultants.
It's best not to get too lost in the cost details here. Critics of the Reuters report like Bob Lutz and Anthony Ingram say, with some justification, that the true cost of the Volt must be spread over the entire lifetime of the car's manufacture. However, this is not the 1960s, it is the 21-teens. In 2012 the economy has imploded. The middle class, which used to comprise the people who might have bought these cars 50 years ago, is toast.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Fuel-Cells/Why-Electric-Cars-Dont-have-a-Future.html
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...
The lack of interest in the car has prevented GM from coming close to its early, optimistic sales projections. Discounted leases as low as $199 a month helped propel Volt sales in August to 2,831, pushing year-to-date sales to 13,500, well below the 40,000 cars that GM originally had hoped to sell in 2012.
Spread out over the 21,500 Volts that GM has sold since the car's introduction in December 2010, the development and tooling costs average just under $56,000 per car. That figure will, of course, come down as more Volts are sold.
The actual cost to build the Volt is estimated to be an additional $20,000 to $32,000 per vehicle, according to Sandy Munro, president of Michigan-based Munro & Associates and the other industry consultants.
It's best not to get too lost in the cost details here. Critics of the Reuters report like Bob Lutz and Anthony Ingram say, with some justification, that the true cost of the Volt must be spread over the entire lifetime of the car's manufacture. However, this is not the 1960s, it is the 21-teens. In 2012 the economy has imploded. The middle class, which used to comprise the people who might have bought these cars 50 years ago, is toast.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Fuel-Cells/Why-Electric-Cars-Dont-have-a-Future.html
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