Featured GM EV Roadmap

Volt being named as an electric vehicle...It held a very thirsty ICE!!
Same as saying Icarus inspired modern aviation!

 

My favorite slogan from their PDF;
TECHNOLOGY WILL HELP UNLOCK THIS FUTURE


GM - often touting how its company is a tech leader, publishes the phrase above ... all the while its leadership was claiming the Prius was a geek mobile. ah, ya gotta love having your cake & eating it too. The tech they are now bragging about is leaning towards autonomous driving. I'm thinking that phrase above was simply cut & pasted out of some tesla tweet. Oh the irony .... the Prius gets a keyless fob way back in 2004, that lets you start the car w/out even having to unlock the door, much less twist a key. Toyota was skimpy to even advertise it. Years later ... the other companies are bragging about their keyless system, that the 2004 Prius already had, for years.
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i like the 'cautionary note on forward looking statements' disclaimer at the very top. iow, this is all bull.

 

I take it the CT200 was a FSP then. Same with Bob's i3 REx. Reel in the hyperbole.
The Volt could have had a for efficient ICE, for a higher price tag, but the plug and EV range meant it didn't need to use that ICE as often as even a Prius.

Look further into other companies' electrification plans, and you will see they are counting hybrids without plugs, even mild ones. Toyota calls a hydrogen fuel only car an electric one, and a major incentive for them to make a plug in is because China says they need one to sell cars there.

The Supreme Court might say corporations are people, but that doesn't mean we have to talk about them as they are. Who of the leadership that belittled the Prius is still with GM?

Everybody is working on autonomous cars now, and I think Google was working on it before Tesla.

The Prius got SKS, and other luxury segment only goods, in the earlier days as a way to make the hybrid system price tag more palatable to buyers. Prius advertising was just skimpy, period.

 

The number 1 car market in the world is China, number 2 market is north america (mainly the US, but mexico and canada do contribute especially in manufacturing parts and assembly of cars and a little bit on the purchases).

In the late '90s and early 2000s, chinese market for non domestic producers was tiny, and regulations in north america actually favored large heavy gas guzzling vehicles. Now the world has changed. China is the biggest potential market, and GM is highly profitable there. Chinese regulations favor plug-in cars. US rising cafe standards favor part of the fleet being plug-ins.

GM had been losing money hand over fist in europe for a decade. Finally this year, GM sold its european operations opel and vauxhaul. That means gm no longer feels the need to waste R&D targetted to the european market, but still has expertise about it.

Mary Barra is temperamentally very different than Rick Waggoner and Bob Lutz who have admitted after it was clear to everyone else that their moves to kill the ev-1 backfired. Their support for fuel cells to delay plug-ins also has been shown to be a bad mistake. Its time to give the new president of gm her due. She is not perfect but her plan to push into plug-ins is being rewarded in the stock market. GM has enough cash to invest in the future, which she sees as plug-ins.

We should see if the plan is working around 2022. I am hopeful, but there still is a lot of dead wood inside gm that may try to stop the transformation. I could not read the linked article but assume its the same information about the electric vehicle platform. Nissan also announced an alliance with Renault and Mitsubishi to have 12 new plug-ins by 2022. Mercedes, VW, and BMW are all also investing heavily and are working on a 400 kw fast charging standard with gm and tesla included. It will be interesting to see what gas and battery prices do between now and then. If Barra is right and battery cells are down to $100/kwh and oil analysts are right and oil prices rise to over $70/bbl by then, then we should see Large transition to plug-ins in about 8 years.