Volt price cut

no deal breaker here either. Lower mpg isn't either. Nore the higher price. At 6'-5" though, there's no way someone's sitting behind me - unless they can fold up ... or unless I suck up against the steering wheel. Here's a more average height person experiencing my issue:


And there are getting to be more & more tall folks.
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Back passengers need to suck it up. They're getting a free ride, and I'm not their chauffeur.

It is a compact. Perhaps we'll see some upsizing like with the gen2 Prius.

 

One word explains it: COST

Price drops are only short-term, limited-scope. For the "more people" to be fulfilled, the vehicle must be available in high-volume and sold at a profit.

While it is true that the Volt price being realigned back to the original target GM had set all along is indeed a win, we're not going to see quantity grow until cost comes down too. That depends upon the generation. There are many upgrades needed.

In Toyota's case, a generation upgrade is not required. There will be a clear benefit it later. But currently, the platform is already available and simply waiting for lithium batteries to become more affordable. The interior space, depleted efficiency, and battery capacity meet goals already. Cost is the hold up.

 

John I do not agree that the Prius can proceed in the marketplace without upgrades. Competition is making challenges. In addition it is not clear that the Prius PlugIn economics are working any better for Toyota than the Volt is for GM. There are still 2012 Prius plugins new on the lot in my area with pretty severe discounts.

Toyota has adapted the technology to a much broader set of platforms than GM. The upcoming Caddy will help GM in their effort to amortize the Volt development costs.

 

Huh? You are making a distinction between "price" which the customer cares about and "cost" which GM cares about. Then you say "we're not going to see quantity grow until cost comes down too". Explain please.

GM appears willing to build as many Volts as customers will buy. There have been no shortages due to artificial volume limits enforced by GM. What are you talking about?

 

Only so many vehicles can be sold at a loss. The propose of the business is to make a profit. It's basic economics.

 

You made a vague reference earlier in the thread to Akerson saying this year that the Volt is selling at a loss. I asked you for a source link but I haven't seen one yet.

How do you know (or why do you assume) that every additional Volt built and sold by GM is resulting in additional losses? I have not seen any such evidence yet.

 

Not necessarily. That is known as shallow cycling since the state of charge window is only around 300-500 Wh. That's only a 2.5% charge swing on a Volt (on a PiP it would be 9%).

Based on research papers and testing results I've seen published for PHEVs, the battery in the Volt is probably designed to handle 200,000+ shallow cycles like that versus only 2,000+ full battery charge cycles.

As a counter example, the PiP battery is more likely to be fully cycled from full to empty because of the shorter range. More Volt drivers are likely to need only part of their 38+ mile EV range during a day of driving and therefore only need a partial recharge. Batteries can do more shallow and partial charges per kWh of stored energy because they are less stressful on the battery.

There are a bunch of other battery life parameters that are relevant like how much power is drawn or charged, and battery temperature management.

Battery chemistry and construction can be used to tune a battery to meet the overall requirements.

 

It was repeated in some of the articles just published. And when he first said it, that was big news! Not sure how it would be even be possible to miss that. Take a moment to think about the situation. There's an entire vehicle like Cruze, with a more complex transmission, two electric motors added, and a large battery-pack, plus the extra controllers & cooling. How can that be profitable at the new price? Digging into the detail of components, it just doesn't add up. I've said my piece. Let the production & sales speak for itself now.

 

Sure, but it's all relative to the underlying size of the battery. Most people rarely draw more than 60 kW during acceleration. The Prius Plugin can draw up to 38 kW from it's battery to assist acceleration.

The rate of charge or discharge on a battery is measured relative to a value known as 'C' which is the rate where all of the power is transferred in a single hour. In other works, the Volt battery is 16.5 kWh so 16.5 kW is 1C. For a PiP, 1C is 4.4 kW.

So, a strong acceleration in the Volt at 60 kW is just under 4C.

A strong acceleration in the PiP would be capped at it's maximum rate of 38 kW (the Volt max is 111 kW and so not relevant here).

So, 38 kW on a PiP battery would be over 8C.

As I noted earlier, this is just one battery characteristic and can be tuned through use of battery chemistry and construction. On the same battery, however, regular accelerations at 8C would be harder on battery life than 4C.

 

no. the battery is larger and can take more kWh in/out than the smaller PiPs battery. Additionally the Volt's battery is thermally managed. I'll try to dig up the non-gm research that actually indicates that the Volt's approach leads to a longer battery life.

 

The Volt battery has a large buffer on capacity. It is a 16kWh battery with a SOC between 30% to 80%. When CS mode kicks in the battery isn't depleted. It also isn't always using the battery for acceleration. That would entail unnecessary losses going from the generator to battery to motor. CS mode is mostly as a serial hybrid with power going directly to the motor.

If the power demand is low enough, the car shunts the excess electricity generated into the battery instead of letting the ICE output drop to a less efficient power band. Just like the Prius does.

 

The 30-80 range was an early baseline assumption during design but the final production cars use a range of 22-87.

City driving is often mostly serial mode (unless you know how to use better driving technique) but most highway driving is serial/parallel.

You are probably thinking of a report from one of the U.S. national labs that found a generic PHEV 40 would have better battery life than a generic PHEV10. I don't have time to dig up the report URL right now. It wasn't literally Volt vs. Prius Plugin.

I could guess at what your talking about but that would be inefficient. Do you have even a single link to a news article?

 

I'm going to assume this is related to Akerson's comments during a wide-ranging on-stage interview at a business conference sponsored by Forbes magazine on April 30, 2013.

Here's a typical news story:

Business: Washington Post Business Page, Business News

The full transcript of the interview is at:

Transcript: GM CEO Daniel Akerson at Brainstorm Green - Fortune Tech


My interpretation of Akerson's remarks would not go beyond the notion that GM has not yet recouped their R&D investment when spread across the total revenue of all Volts sold minus the cost of production. Akerson himself did not unambiguously say that each individual Volt sale accrues additional GM losses.

I think it is at least as likely that each additional sale breaks even or makes a modest gross profit which incrementally lowers GM's "loss" on the Volt and leads to lower future component costs through volume production.

It's only been 2.5 years since deliveries began on a car with a lot of new technology and unique parts. I'm not particularly surprised it hasn't paid off all that R&D cost yet.

 

Had a feeling the info on Wikipedia was dated.

The main point is that in CS mode, the Volt puts as much abuse on the battery as a Prius does.

 

There is one basic you keep skipping in both your references to GM and Toyota. Having been in the production manufacturing side of a business and learning the lesson first hand, please remember this:

Production Cost is a continuously decreasing parameter!

Picking a price point or one profitability comment as a permanent state of affairs can only apply at one point, at one specific time. The problem for any manufacturer is to setup the production run to end profitably at the end of the run, not the start. The economic modeling that goes into this is involved, not simple, so be careful with the statement it's "simple economics". It's actually very hard decision making. Just because GM was lousy in the past and Toyota was good in the past is no guarantee that the future must be the same.

To me the worry is GM returning to making cost cuts by removing reliability, not that the Volt is a bad design. It's kicking the PiP sales numbers and will continue to do so if it remains reliable.

 

That's why I stated an specific value, since it should go without saying that costs are always dropping.

However, there's the cold hard reality of supplier contracts and assembly machinery... both of which can be quite inflexible.