Posted on 12/23/2011 12:23:12 PM PST by jazusamo
Wait till all those coal fired power plants are gone. Nowhere to recharge that Volt!
I, for one, would like to know if the first production Volt is still in service.. (um, with no rebuilds)
The Volt has been discharged..................
These Dolt vehicles will be valuable collectors in the future. Only a few of them made, only a few sold. They’ll be like Edsels, Corvairs or DeLoreans. Pick one up today for $40000, sell it in 25 years for $50000.
If they can lose a million dollars per unit on an electric car, just think how much money they could lose on an atomic car!
What about a diesel hybrid with a well-designed diesel engine (not the 350 cu inch V-8 gas engine that was a disaster during the late 1970s)?
One what? One sale?
When does GM go out of business?
Yep, should the EV goal set by the turkey in the WH bet met the elimination of coal fired plants will be a real problem. That extra electrical power sure won’t be supplied by wind or solar and it’s evident the enviro nuts will fight more nuclear plants.
According to this link, the Volts cost the taxpayers $250K each:
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/16192
What was the stupid part? Stopping production — or starting it in the first place? Who was the stupid party? GM for attempting to build an EV, well before its time — or the government of California for creating a mandate for “zero emission vehicles”? Who was stupidest — GM for actually manufacturing an EV; or critics (such as the producers of the propaganda movie about killing the EV), who were harsh on GM, but didn't criticize manufactures who never even attempted to build an EV.
EV1 had an incredibly sophisticated chassis and body, for the time. It was a very expensive vehicle to manufacture (estimates are $1 million/vehicle actually produced, and no clear way to bring the cost down to an affordable level, through mass production). The problem was with the battery technology of the time. There simply was no way to manufacture a viable, and affordable EV with lead-acid, or NiMh batteries.
When you add up all the subsidies, governments at the state and local level have subsidized each Volt sold to the tune of $250,000. Without subsidies, each car would cost about $300,000 each to produce.
The government is incompetent when it comes to industrial policy. It should resist the temptation.
It's too PIG to fail.
GM still sells plenty of SUV's and trucks. They are not alone in fumbling the domestic sedan market, or overestimating the appeal of EV's.
They need to downscale production targets pronto though because there is no significant market for plug in electrics in the US outside of a few urban centers.
Not sure who besides the administration is leading them to believe otherwise, it certainly isn't consumers.
“What’s next?”
They go out of production?
sad, I was in the nuclear industry for decades..
When does GM go out of business?
They can not fail as long as long as we have a short sighted PRO-regressove running things.
They will take money from healthy companies via taxes and give it to companies that should be left to die like they let Terry Shiavo die.
Who knows, they might be able to modify it so the battery can be used to recharge cell phones and i-pads and such. That would make it at least a little useful until it's relegated to a trailer park yard ornament. Junkyards will probably charge you to haul it off - not enough in production to make the usual parts useful and probably a lot of extra expenses to quarantine the battery...
If there's one thing Silicon Valley upstarts know, it's vaporware.
Tesla is not in the business of building cars. Tesla is in the business of bilking investors. They will produce just enough cars to keep the investor money flowing. But they have no rational business plan that results in them mass producing and marketing automobiles, beyond what is necessary to rip-off investors looking for the "next big thing".
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