Chevy stops Volt production (temporarily ...)

Nope, focus is quality, efficiency and value vs lowest selling price. Trophy is going for pure EV and ignoring the other aspects and other vehichles needed to get there.

The price differential for a Plug in Prius vs a Volt is not that much (2K), but the efficiency and power gains are significant enough to warrant that premium, just as the original Prius premium over other cheap cars was/is justified.

If its just price, then the insight is cheaper than the Prius C, and much cheaper than the Prius. In fact the insight is, and has been for most of Gen1 and Gen2 history, the cheapest Hybrid in the country. But quality has many more dimensions. For that matter the BMW 325 is way more expensive than either, yet it still sell quite well.

"We" are being realistic; you are demanding innovations that don't follow the normal adoption/pricing curve. Your logic would have demanded Toyota kill the prius, or drop its price to loose money. I'm glad they did neither.

 

Can't we all just get along? -RK
Seriously why does every volt thread bring out the anti-ev thoughts and the prius against volt topics again and again. The volt sold over 2,800 in August, more than all the other plug-ins in North America combined.

Like your prius phv. That's great, I like it that people are using so little gasoline. That is no reason to criticize the volt. Like the volt, and saving a lot of gas with that as well that is great. No reason the phv is a bad car.

We are bringing up some quite disimilar cars here. The volt has none of the 3cylinder, 2 seat, wheel skirt quirkiness of the insight. Some of that wierdness makes people love them, and I see more original insights on the road than gen I prii. The volt has a back seat and plenty of power along with a normal 4 cylinder engine and 17" tires. I don't see much of a comparison with the original insight other than they were innovative. Volt already has a 1.5 design in progress. Honda never made any big changes with the insight.

 

Not that simple; remember, this is GM.
You have to break down the sales figures into 3 groups:
1. Sold at a loss
2. Sold at marginal production cost
3. Sold at a profit that justifies more production

 

We don't have to break them down as that is overly simplistic model of how companies work and/or make decisions. Something can be sold "at a loss" and still justify production... because its viewed as a loss-leader (ask any retail store about that) or because its an investment in (usually disruptive) technology that will provide competitive advantage in years to come. It can also just be accounting games that determine loss vs profit.

However, if you happen to have such a breakdown for GM, or any company, that would be interesting to use in a class case-study.

 

We can probably ignore loss-leaders, since that idea implies people buy other profitable stuff before they walk out the store. How many people buy a Volt and a truck, too

My WAG is that sales to fleet belong in category 2, and leases at $250/month belong in category 1. We should probably have a fourth category, sales to government. That is just additional subsidy. Is anything left ?

As for R&D advantages: I'm not overly impressed by a Toyota HSD copy as 'company DNA', and the electric expertise gained could be jotted up to the GM EV fiasco. No double dipping.

I do not dispute that my breakdown can be criticized, but my point is that quoting a total sales number is practically useless in the case of GM Volt sales.

 

If you read the legitamate business press, the volt halo has been pulling sales of cruzes. If you watch fox news, which I know you do, you may be thinking obama is buying them all. The gen I Prius lost a lot of money, but drew sales of corrolas and camries. The gen II was profitable. Dumping innovative cars is normally a mistake.

But y0ur whole line of reasoning is far off. GM is ramping up production so they have cars to sell in october when the plant is closed. If it was because of inventory A) August sales would be low, and B) factory would be ramping down.

Do you have a break down of any of those figures. The last time an idiot political attack analyst said that, forbes debunked it with the real numbers. There are dealer incentives that happen at a certain volume. The dealers can lose money on the last cars if they sell enough. As a group the volt asp is sound. The dealer incentives make more sense now that battery costs have dropped in the 2013s.

Why is that? I was correcting the incorrect idea that sales were tanking instead of at an all time high. The sales number is the only important one here. Leaf sales have been doing poorly. I hope that nissan can drop the price with north american production. Exporting cars from Japan is brutal with 78 yen to the dollar.

 

The word is legitimate.

I think the halo argument is an interesting one, although I have no way to quantify numbers. I do remember Volt fans frothing at the mouth when the halo idea was raised by Volt detractors

Tangentially, what is a legitimate business publication ? The only ones I can read without feeling like a shower afterwards are Bloomberg and the Financial Times. I do not think of the NYT as a business pub, but I do think their business reporting is worth reading. I gave up on the WSJ after it was acquired by Murdoch.

 

243 MPG was the resulting overall average upon pulling into my garage, with a recharge at work. You and I recognize the variance capacities & distance bring. That's important when conveying information about the technologies being offered.

The incentives are trouble. They mask the massive effort still required to make Volt affordable. We need something that is profitable and sells in high enough volume to sustain business. When and how is that going to happen? The clock is ticking.

 

I never considered myself a volt detractor, but it appears to be a halo.

This is from a very pro-volt opinion piece in hybrid cars
Should Chevy Volt Remain A 'Political Punching Bag?' | Hybrid Cars

I don't agree that the volt reversed gm's declining reputation for innovation, but I have to agree its a better halo than the corvette for gm's future.

NYT, businessweek, WSJ, economist, forbes all have very high quality businessnews. They also all have editorials in the publications, and is important to not confuse the two. The WSJ editorial pages are quite different than its news. Forbes has had editorials that have been both pro and anti-volt, but the news pages have been fairly neutral.

 

...for efficiency we should instead look two things, miles/gallon (gaso mode) and miles/kwhr (EV mode). Admittedly it would be nice to interconvert these, and there is no perfect technique, but I personally use 50 MPG is approx equal to 3 miles/kwhr.

 

Incentives can be catagorized as trouble or.... incubation of new technology. The price of battery packs in the volt has already fallen. I do not know why you insist on making this a volt versus prius thing. We all expect the prius battery pack will grow in capactity before the credits run out.

On the optimistic side we have a start up talking about $150/kwh in a gm car by 2016, roughly $2500 for cells in the volt sized pack. The DOE talks about $300/kwh by 2020 or $5000 in a volt sized pack, or maybe technology will fall short. There is no reason to design down to 2010 technology. Its the second generation phv, volts, and energis that need to make money, right now its about developing the technology.

 

We'll have to disagree about businessweek but I endorse Forbes, it just slipped my mind. I have been so impressed I keep meaning to buy a subscription.

I am aware of the difference between editorials, blogs, and news. In the case of the WSJ, the first two are propaganda, and the third is reported with a heavy filter.

 

[/QUOTE]
The incentives are trouble. They mask the massive effort still required to make Volt affordable. We need something that is profitable and sells in high enough volume to sustain business. When and how is that going to happen? The clock is ticking.[/quote]

 

Since they both have the goal of mainstream sales, why wouldn't there be comparisons?

 

All three cars are nearly the first generation of each company's hybrids:

• 2000-06 Insight - the first IMA, Honda hybrid.
• 2001-03 Prius - the first North American, Toyota hybrid. The first generation was a Japan-only, NHW10.
• 2010-current Volt - GM's first serious hybrid.

Honda carried on their IMA into subsequent hybrids and even resurrected the Insight name with small, Prius-like, hatchback. It continues although at a sedate pace.

Volt missed the party in 2001 when they killed not only the EV1 but never built the Precept, the prototype of the Volt. So they lost a decade fooling themselves with BAS and two-modes. At least the Volt has arrived, a decade late and sized to complete with the NHW11.

As for the Prius, it has become part of a family of Prius but if you include the Camry, Highlander, and Lexus, a broad spectrum of hybrids and multi-generational. But I've left off one company, Ford.

Independent yet often parallel paths, Ford and Toyota have and continue to set the standard of hybrid performance. Although Ford dropped the hybrid Escape, the C-MAX promises to be a great replacement.

The Volt like the first Insight and earliest Prius is first-generation. Rough around the edges, we can only hope it achieves the breadth of Prius/Ford bodies and generational improvements. Hopefully Volt won't plateau like the IMA family. But it will take engineering, not advocacy, to fix the first-generation limitations and that takes time and commitment . . . GM's challenge.

Bob Wilson

 

Very well put!

It is the difference between an image and the reality of 'wheels on road.' Let me give an example, the Saturn VUE two-mode.

I and two other friends had a chance to ride around a snowy Detroit in a pre-production model in January 2009. I spoke with one of the engineers and he reported that the chief management directive was to have the word "Hybrid" embedded in the door paint. You can still see this word in the Tahoe two-mode paint jobs. It is the illusion of fuel economy and if the car actually achieved anything . . . it was an accident of engineering.

Given the choice between 'ego' and 'erg', one moves mass down the road and the other won't.

Bob Wilson

 

The new 54 MPG CAFE fuel standards released the other day by Obama Admin (other thread) reportedly calls for longer term continuation of EV credits/subsidies, with the goal to reduce oil use. I do not know specifics but am on the look-out for any summary of how this would work. So the clock may be ticking, but it is in the process of being re-wound.

I like tax credits as much as the next guy, having got both the hybrid and C4C credits. If these EV credits hold out long enough (years) I will go for the rebate Triple Play. Speaking of baseball, Go NATS!

 

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  OK

Sure, but they didn't add the extra clutch like hyundai, to get it to progress. The battery languished too small and they had battery management problems.

The precept was the anti-volt. Volt is patterned after the ev1 with range extender. This is the precept
The Green Brigade - Car Comparison - Feature Article - Page 4

3 cyclinder diesel that failed emissions versus traditional low cost 4 cylinder with sulev emissions. exotic materials where money is no object and everything for aerodyanics, versus the volts mundane steel .28 cd.

The precept has many of the failings of the original insight, but was much worse. It was never designed to be made.

Let's give the volt a chance and not make it seem like the precept.

 

The post was about production shut down, which turns out to be about the impala not the volt.

Certainly this has nothing to do with the prius phv does it? Why are you always wining about main stream sales? What does that have to do with this thread. Yes the F150s are certainly selling well this year.

 

THANKS!

I was only aware of the Partnership for Next Generation charts and did not realize a protype Precept had been made and handed to Car and Driver. We'll probably have to agree to disagree on the family of EV1, Precept and Volt and their merit. Regardless, the May 2001 publication date pretty well documents GM's 'lost decade' between the EV1/Precept and the Volt . . . opportunity lost.

Bob Wilson