“The very expensive death of the Chevy Volt,” as diagnosed by John Hayward at Breitbart.com:
I’ve been a student of the Chevy Volt electric-car debacle since the first time I took a stab at figuring out the actual per-unit cost of each car, with the subsidies figured in. The thing launched with a sticker price of $41,000, but direct state and federal subsidies – i.e. taxpaying chumps forced at gunpoint to pay for part of your shiny new electric car – could take it down to $33,500 or less. But if you figured in all the subsidies those taxpayer chumps were forced to give manufacturers, they really cost at least $81,000 apiece. You paid $33k or so, while people who will never drive a Volt, and maybe never buy a Chevy, covered the rest.
Later Voltologists suggested I was being far too generous to this boondoggle, because the subsidies indirectly drawn into production of the vehicle and its battery were far larger than the direct nuts-and-bolts subsidies I was counting. It has been suggested the real unit cost was closer to $200,000 per car.
Hayward goes on to note:
Well, here we are in 2014, and it can be decisively stated that skyrocketing Volt sales are not in the cards. In fact, Detroit News reports that the European version of the Vault is being scrapped completely. As for domestic sales…
Volt sales have also struggled and never met GM’s initial forecasts for sales growth.
Volt sales fell 34 percent in June in the United States to 1,777 and are down 12.6 percent this year to 8,615. GM cut prices of its plug-in hybrid Volt last year. It’s also offering hefty incentives for its slow-selling plug-in Cadillac ELR, which has sold just 390 vehicles in the first half of the year.
Last September, then GM CEO Dan Akerson told The Detroit News the automaker would take on upstart EV automaker Tesla Motors. Akerson said the Detroit automaker plans to confront Tesla via its Cadillac brand.
“If you want to compete head-to-head with Tesla, and we ultimately will, you want to do it with a Cadillac,” he said.
Yes, and you want to do it with your own money, you corporate parasite. What’s the big strategy for the crippled Volt taking down the arthritic Tesla in the Who-Gives-A-Damn electric car micro-market?
While GM will cheerfully continue rake in tax payer dollars to build their hybrids, their deep down sense of shame is perhaps reflected in their recent ad for the coal-powered Cadillac, whose strutting theme is the antithesis of the welfare state, corporate and otherwise:
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