Chevy Volt->Bad For GM->Bad For US Energy Supply

IBD/The Lid ^ | 8/14/09 | The Lid

[Shellybenoit]

With great fanfare, General Motors announced this week the Chevy Volt, the car picked by the Obama administration to turn the company around, will get around 240 miles/gallon, if true, certainly a great achievement. What was not mentioned is that General Motors will be selling the Volt at a loss, in other words the company will lose money every time someone buys a Volt. This proves the great influence GM's new owners the Obama administration, has on the new GM, no body in this government understands capitalism.

There is more bad news about this Government Motors model that the POTUS wants to shove down our throats, it will hurt rather than protect our energy supply:

[Mr. K]

Hopey Changie Dork did not have to take over ALL the car companies to nationalize the auto industry, only one.

Then they just sell cars at a loss until they drive the others out of business.

At taxpayer expense.

[Kackikat]

It may get over 200 mpg..but how many miles does it go, and then needs to be recharged...I HEARD ONLY 40 MILES...with most places not in city, that is not acceptable.

[9422WMR]

But if they change the available fuel to ounce quantities, then 32 ounces will only get you 60 miles!!!!!;-]

[Tarpon]

If anybody buys the 230 mpg, I have a 100 acres of swamp land I will sell cheap. It’s under water right now, but the government promised to drain the Everglades. You could be rich.

[al baby]

"General Motors will be selling the Volt at a loss, in other words the company will lose money every time someone buys a Volt"

Don't worry they will make it up on volume

[Fingolfin]

40 miles is electric only. The on board gas engine then kicks in and goes another 200+ miles.

[element92]

If I owned one, I would not need any gasoline.

who has a problem with that?

it cuts the ragheads out of the deal.

[4rcane]

yea, I would be rolling on the floor laughing if that end up being the truth. So 200 mpg, but can only travel 40 miles before needing a recharge

[Man50D]

no body in this government understands capitalism.

Oh yes they do. That's why they are trying to destroy capitalism. The problem is many people who support capitalism don't understand the Cloward-Piven Strategy

[4rcane]

I kinda have high hopes for this GM volt.I hope it doesn’t disappoint me. While the price will suck, if the technology can deliver what it promises, then its a great achievement

[WHBates]

Some genius in the government had better figure out how all of these electric cars are going to get power from an overloaded grid, as windmills and solar aren't going to make any difference any time soon. However they will drain our pockets and cost us jobs, what a deal.

[ThunderSleeps]

Someone should explain to the government lackey "overseeing" GM (isn't he 20 something with no business experience?) that a "loss leader" only works to bring people in the door. The idea with a LL is that you'll take the loss on that item, but make it up on the other stuff the consumer buys while at your establishment. However, that generally only works in retail stores such as clothing, pharmacies, general merchandise (Wal-Mart et. al.), and grocery stores - places where people will buy other stuff. When was the last time you walked into a car dealership and bought a half dozen vehicles?

Someone should also explain to the socialist powers that be that the US power grid cannot handle any significant number of electric vehicles. If even a small percentage of commuters drove home from work and plugged in a Volt or similar vehicle, it would crash the power grid. I read somewhere a while back that at peak loads (eg. of an evening when everyone returns from work, cranks up the AC, cooks dinner, flips on the TV and/or computer, lights, etc.) most of the grid is operating with very little spare capacity. Maybe if the 'rats and their environmental wacko supporters had let us build more nuclear power plants, a) we wouldn't be so dependent on foreign oil; and b) we would have enough capacity in the national power grid to seriously consider electric vehicles.

[Kirkwood]

Sounds like it has a pretty tiny gas tank. I would be spending half my life pulling into the pump.

[HiTech RedNeck]

This is not kosher.

[chickenlips]

The Dhims are going to require that a windmill be installed on each one, so as you drive it recharges the batteries. They’ll likely get a gazillion miles per gallon! (Do I really need to say “sarcasm”?)

[Ditter]

Has anyone said how much charging up your car is going to add to your electricity bill?

[MamaDearest]

It may get over 200 mpg..but how many miles does it go, and then needs to be recharged...I HEARD ONLY 40 MILES...with most places not in city, that is not acceptable.

It'd be a lot cheaper to buy a bicycle or a small motorcycle (or at whatever suggested retail price it will be - hundreds of bicycles or several motorcycles). 40 miles is hardly any distance from home at all. It's basically unfit for taking a trip of any distance beyond that without recharging - so the 200 mpg is IMHO a farce.

[Secret Agent Man]

It has a small gas engine that will kick in after the batteries are used up. But this will then decrease the 240 mpg rating to something lower.

[normanpubbie]

Enough of this nonsense, people. YWL, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for taking as true an unsubstantiated claim from some blog. Here's what the blog said about selling the Volt at a loss:

It is likely that GM will initially sell the Volt at a loss, hoping that it would recoup the development costs in future-generation models as Toyota has done with its Prius.

What did they base their claim on? They didn't say but Yid took it as the unvarnished truth.

Now we get to the main claim of Yid's article -- that according to an Investors Business Daily editorial, putting electric vehicles on the power grid could crash the grid. Here's the money quote from the IBD editorial:

TransGas' Victor, a New Yorker, is familiar with brownouts and blackouts. After decades of refusing to build nuclear power plants or clean facilities such as the one he proposes, does the system have enough capacity? He wonders if the electrical grid can handle even a few thousand Chevy Volts. He warns that adding them to "a growing list of devices that need to be plugged in will put a major strain on an already flimsy electrical supply and distribution infrastructure."

In an earlier thread I calculated that one million Chevy Volts would draw 6.21 billion KW-hr from the grid in a year's time. That's a huge number, no doubt.

Problem is, I didn't think big enough. So let's hypothetically put 300 million Chevy Volts on the road, one for every man, woman, and child in our country. That works out to be 1863 billion KW-hr and will really tax the power grid, right?

Nope.

Last year, the American power grid delivered 3 million billion KW-hr. Divide 1863 billion into 3,000,000 billion and you will see that our 300 million electric cars would have used only 1/1610th of all electricity delivered in the U.S. last year.

What's particularly disgraceful about IBD printing such a spurious claim is that they deal in numbers. So they have no excuse for not checking the math.