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Posted on 04/19/2012 12:26:19 PM PDT by BO Stinkss
General Motors reached another Obama milestone when they announced late on a Friday afternoon that they were suspending production of the Obama-inspired Chevy Volt for five weeks due to lack of demand.
Presumably the Volt was an attempt by GM to help Obama with his pledge to put 1 million electric cars on the road in return for the tens of billions of dollars in forgivable “loans” that the company got from the Obama administration from the TARP bailout.
The hybrid gas-electric vehicle gets 25 miles on a full, overnight charge and costs around $40,000. To date, GM has sold around 10,000 vehicles. To put it in perspective, the Chevy Corvette has a sticker price of $49,600.
If the Volt’s not in the federal witness protection program, it ought to be.
“Sales also took a hit last fall when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into why two Volts burst into flames days or weeks after severe NHTSA crash testing,” reports USA Today. Leaks from the cooling system were caused by shortages in the electrical system that prompted the fires. But the discovery came only after weeks of bad press for GM. Eventually the car company offered to buy back every single Volt for any consumer who was unhappy.
But lack of sales- and production- hasn’t stopped the government-owned car company from mapping out a marketing strategy that might have been fashioned by the marketing geniuses of the IRS and the United States Postal Service combined: “The Volt’s technology and its recent accolade from Consumer Reports make the Volt a marketing tool for Chevy,” said Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet U.S. sales, at the beginning of December according to Bloomberg. “This vehicle is about more than how many we sell,” Batey said. “This vehicle is a
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.townhall.com ...
The Edsel for the 1%.
WHAT!? It was Motor Trend’s 2011 CAR OF THE YEAR!
Don’t tell me they based it on politics.
That would change my whole world.
By my reckoning that is the second five week suspension. That would be ten weeks total
(or is this a late report of the initial suspension?)
I’m surprised The Dictator didn’t just mandate them for all government agencies and pay for them with stimulus funds.
I thought Chevy said the Volt was selling strong. Well, lies from the Obama administration is not ‘unexpected’.
This is so typical of government intervention. They couldn’t build a plug for a hound dogs butt if they had a turd for a mold. That is if Obama hasn’t already eaten the dog.
“Hitler Finds Out Chevrolet is Stopping Production of the Volt” in five, four, three...
And how many Corvettes were sold in that same period?..............
This is a shock. A shock! Get it?
My mistake - this article was from March 3rd
Soon to join the Yugo in the Automobile Hall of Shame.
Well if you don’t like being in that state of surprise, I have *cough* something of interest:
“It should be noted that about 4,000 of the 6,142 Volts sold [in 2011] were government purchases. Only a little over 2,000 were consumer purchases.”
http://2012nevadacounty.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/killing-the-ca-economy-with-ab-32/
Good question
” To put it in perspective, the Chevy Corvette has a sticker price of $49,600. “
And I’d bet that GM doesn’t have to coerce dealers to put a Corvette in their showrooms...
That should have been “The Automobile Hall of Sham.”
Give it a day or two and Obowelmovement will blame it on white hispanics killing all the unicorns.
HaHaHaHaHaHahaha
The Chevy Volt is NOT the perfect car for the 1%, or anyone else! It’s a DUD. Who needs it?!!!!
Using the overburdened electric grid for transportation energy, in addition to its current uses, is just plan dumb. In terms of environmental impact, electric cars are basically fueled by non-clean coal instead of gasoline. I know that the Gorons dream of putting solar, biofuel, etc. energy into the grid, but we’re not there yet, by a long shot!
The good news is that it is getting near the time for the announcement of the second 5 week suspension as they sweat out the numbers and calculate the losses.
It’s like the department of labor sweating the unemployment rate the night before the announcement
“Gloom, despair and agony on me-e!
Deep dark depression, excessive misery-y!
If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all!
Gloom, despair and agony on me-e-e!”
But they just SUSPENDED production of the Edsel, right?
That’s not fair. The Edsel sold 84,000 units; Volt is sitting on, what, 12,000 in sales?
This must be just a rumor. I didn’t see anything on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, NYT, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR about it. </sarc>
LOL! Post of the day!
If you drive a Volt, you probably "work" for the government, and don't care about the costs.
How exactly did Obama inspire a car that was on GM’s drawing board for two years before he took office ?
I’m as anti Zero as anybody, but I wish people would stop trying to associate him with the Volt. It was GW Bush that signed the energy bill that included the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles back in 2007, two year before Zero came into power.
Exactly. Who but the government... and a few of the very stupidest of the stupid liberals?
How many of the rest did GE buy?
There were more Yugos sold than Volts
How could it get worse? GSA personnel buying Chevy Volts and picking up prostitutes in them...
All BHO has to do is issue an executive order requiring every family in the country buy one, that will get the line open again. Of course if the Dems win the election and regain the House, they will probably pass legisation under the commerce clause requring just that.
They probably now that this guy won’t be in the WH for much longer, and that they want to put that fiasco behind them.
LMAO.... just another Epic Fail for Obama.
I wonder how the suckers that bought this crap feel today. LOL
Gee whiz, Obama needs to go after those filthy rich one-percenters and end the $7500 subsidy rebate. They should pay full price just to be fair to the 99 percenters.
I’ll tell you how Obama was involved in the Volt. He gave lots of money to GE, and Bush didn’t
The Yugo probably failed because of poor engineering & manufacturing. A failed excecution of a sound concept.
The Chevy Volt is floundering because the fundamental concept is unsound. There is little demand for this product. If GM were still a regular carmaker operating on market principles they never would have gone into production with this thing.
Yes but...
The go no go decision was probably influenced by our Lear Deader and his team and Lutz's desire for a swan song. Again my engineering gnome says it is clever from an engineering standpoint, but IMHO I don't see the next 1/2-ing every 18 months in battery power. If so the Battery Pack would be 1/2 of it's current 435 lbs which equals the BTU equivalent of one gallon of gas...
If you knew how many projects that are canceled that never see the public's light of day. Some as far as fully functional production intent cars, and for whatever reason someone says no.
If someone would have here, GM might have been saved quite a bit of embarrassment. FWIW, this maybe another Pontiac Aztec. The real story with that was marketing had it as a hit, but they loaded it up so the price-point was out reach of the intended markets, one of which was out of college kids looking for a camping / activity car...
I always wondered what market the Pontiac Aztec could possibly have been designed to appeal to...and for what.
It was still a bad idea...not just fugly.
Maybe they did -- maybe they didn't.
If the government weren't involved in GM and if the government's $7,500 gift to buyers didn't exist, I would find the Volt a fascinating piece of transitional technology. I'm all in favor of electric car experimentation.
I just want to choose whether I contribute to it or not.
Hard to tell exactly, but your cynicism is well-founded:
“The Detroit News reports this week [Nov 11, 2010] that “General Electric will convert half its 30,000 worldwide fleet of vehicles to electrics, including purchasing 12,000 cars from GM beginning with the 2011 Chevrolet Volt...””
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/253165/ge-buys-volts-taxpayers-get-charged-henry-payne
GE has bought a few Volts as fleet vehicles, but all fleet sales including GE only account for 5% of the Volts sold thus far. GE would naturally want to popularize electric vehicles since they build turbines for electric generating plants. Not to mention saving $100/mo in fuel costs per month per fleet vehicle.
GE received $25M in grants from the Obozo stimulus to their Global Research Center, not the division buying Volts.
Sounds like a pretty thin connection to me.
And your assertion that GE received no grant money under Bush is incorrect. I know they received $8M for solar energy research in 2007, plus who knows how much more.
Technology companies get grants to do research all the time, under all administrations.
All of which is beside the point. The point is that the Volt is an excellent vehicle, and Zero had no more to do with it than Bush did — basically, nothing — and neither one deserves any credit for it. For an entirely new design to get 93% “yes, I’d buy it again” in surveys from actual owners is quite an accomplishment. The Porsche 911 only scored 91%.
“If someone would have here, GM might have been saved quite a bit of embarrassment. “
I don’t see the embarrassment anywhere but here on FR, by people that want to bash the Volt because they have it linked in their minds with Obozo.
I don’t see any reason for the actual owners of the Volt to give it a 93% satisfaction rating if they don’t actually like it. If there were significant buyer’s remorse, the actual owners — as opposed to political bashers — would say so. I don’t think Consumer Reports would risk their reputation by phonying up an owner satisfaction survey.
As far as battery power, weight, and cost goes, the power to weight ratio is adequate already. As far as battery cost goes, the answer is simple — let somebody else worry about that by leasing rather than buying. People are leasing Volts for $350/mo and trading $150/mo in fuel costs for $50/mo in fuel+electric. That makes the car equivalent to a $250/mo conventional vehicle, and battery replacement cost is somebody else’s worry.
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