Does the Volt Really Cost over $81,000 ?

This is just ridiculous.

Every business has risks. If you don't sell enough, you lose money, it's just that simple. You can't look at Volt as costing $80,000 or $100,000 per car. The R&D is supposed to amortize. I think they made some very foolish decisions pertaining to size and power. I think if they introduce a slower, more compact version of the Volt, they will be extremely successful with it.

 

Think about it this way, the ev1's cost is estimated at about $100K per unit, since there were so few units. If you include the cost of the government program png from clinton/gore this gets even higher. The thing is those costs were already fixed when the ev1 was killed, and now it is virtually universally agreed that killing the ev1 hurt gm in terms of marketing, technology, and cafe. The question is not what it cost going backward but what it cost going forward - and gm volt cost around $40K initially and variable costs should go own in each of the next 2 years. Killing the volt is much more expensive than supporting it.

And yes the Gen I prius lost a great deal of money, and MITI paid in money that is never counted. The prius also gave toyota marketing muscle and technology that were much greater than those costs.

I don't think people are saying, can I get something a lot slower for $1K less. I hope that the volt is sucessful enough to go to an even better design in the next generation. Without the volt, I'm not sure we would be seeing the phv prius next year.

 

Totally agree. Tesla prods GM, Gm Prod's others. Not if only the Volt had scared Toyota into a more substantial Pip..

 

Disingenuous, to be kind.

If I spend $800M developing a new tablet computer and after day one of production I have only created 800 of them, it's not realistic to say they cost $1M/piece if I'm going to start cranking more and more of them out all the time, with that originally $800M now locked in stone.

The number is fair if the Volt cut production now and never made any more, but research/development costs come in at the front, and obviously get lower as time goes on and more units are made.