(Reuters) – General Motors Co sold a record number of Chevrolet Volt sedans in August — but that probably isn’t a good thing for the automaker’s bottom line.
Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.
Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.
And while the loss per vehicle will shrink as more are built and sold, GM is still years away from making money on the Volt, which will soon face new competitors from Ford, Honda and others.
More here
$50k per car. Given that the federal government still owns the majority shares of GM, the federal government is subsidizing every car sold. Not in the entire auto industry. Not in domestic auto manufacturers. Only at GM. This is picking winners and losers.
And the liberal/progressives continue with the theme that Obama “saved the American auto industry”. And that without the “bailout”, of which Obama and his admin are completely responsible( Bush only extended a conditional loan to GM), that GM would have failed, and the entire domestic auto industry would have become extinct.
As I said to Larry, that last is a false dichotomy. It presents the situation as being one of only two possible results. Either Obama bails out GM, and it survives, OR, GM receives no bailout and it falls the way of the dinosaurs.
The problem is, that there is no proof whatsoever that without a bailout that GM would have gone away. In order to even suggest something like that, there would have to be a similarly placed company on the verge of bankruptcy in 2008/2009, that received no bailout, and hence, is no more. There isn’t. Not that I remember seeing. So the correlation becomes an exercise in fantasy. And as an avid sci-fi/fantasy reader, I would suggest a very poor fantasy.
On the contrary, however, there is a similar example of a company receiving no bailout money. Who was in a very similar position as GM back then. Who restructured without government involvement. And that at this very time, is the most stable of the domestic auto manufacturers, and arguably, one of the most stable worldwide.
And Bill Clinton is an attributing writer to the fantasy. Clinton claimed that the bailout was responsible for the addition of 250K jobs since 2008. The fact is that GM, the company that Obama nationalized, was responsible for only 4,500 jobs. 1.8% of Clinton’s claim. And, considering that GM, during the bailout and “overhaul” of the company, jettisoned nearly 63,000 jobs when it shed dealerships, it seems to me that GM is still underwater, as far as “jobs created” is concerned.
But don’t let the facts “fool” you. Obama claims GM as a success. That means it must be.
The “Obama saved GM and the American auto industry” theme dies once people look objectively at the data and facts.
I noted in this article that a lot of people who WANT to ”go green,” and own an electric car, but one once (like, say, the Prius) then don’t want another one of the same.
Some of them leave electric altogether.
Some of them try the Volt.
One of the biggest problems the Chevy Volt produces, along with the Nissan Leaf and all other plug-in electric, or hybrid-electric cars, is the drain on an already stretched thin electric power grid.
Couple that with the damage Obama’s energy policies intend to do, if not already doing, to the nation’s coal-fired electric plants, and brown-outs, or even black-outs, are a distinct possibility.
If the liberal/progressives, and greenies (sometimes they aren’t one-and-the-same) desires are granted, power bills will see a marked increase, along with the shortages I already mentioned. In this economy, with fuel costs rising and food costs already tapping people’s budgets out, what will happen when they start receiving electricity bills several hundred dollars higher than they already are?
Double your loses.
Double your un-fun.
The Department of Defense is buying 1,500 Volts.
Also the General Services Administration (of Las Vegas fame) purchased 100 Volts in 2011 for various agencies.
http://freebeacon.com/great-green-car-fleet/
This is the way it goes with naysayers. The first B-29 bomber cost a billion dollars in production costs. It’s initial tests suggested over the course of many months that it was going to be a flop. It was criticized in some sectors as a boondoggle—although it was the most streamline and technologically advanced bomber ever developed in the world. But the government kept producing more, upgrading the failures, until almost 900 running regular raids over Japan itself—and delivered the one-two knock-out punch which some say ended WWII.
Moral: Success is not without failure.
@liberal1(objectivity):
The last time I checked, Congress had a responsibility to provide for the common defense. That includes assessing and paying for weapons for our military.
Maybe you can show me, in Article I, Section 8, of our Constitution, where Congress, and our government, is supposed to pay for people’s everyday items. Maybe you can show me where it allows our government to buy up majority shares in a business, essentially nationalizing it. Maybe you can show me where it allows Congress, and our government, to subsidize the products of that company, to the benefit of the few, or the benefit of the company itself over it’s competition.
That last is the worst, by the way. For all of you and yours crying about “fairness”, you give no thought to government “picking and choosing” who wins and who loses in the industry of automobile manufacturing. Even when the company the government has backed is failing once more. Fairness? Laughable.
@liberal1(objectivity):
So you compare a fighter plane to a Chevy Volt? That’s stretching even for you, Lib1.
How does costing the American taxpayer billions of dollars to build Obama’s pie-in-the-sky green cars defend our nation or advance national security like the B-29 did? And all that electricity to charge a car that has a very limited range; where do you think that comes from?
The Chevy Volt is a major fail. It is too expensive to buy, to expensive to recharge, cannot compete with other hybrid/electric vehicles, and if it were not for the federal government buying them on our taxpayer dime, the plant that builds the Volt would be closed permanently, instead of just shutting down for two months this year.
@liberal1(objectivity): It’s not the same thing. The only thing holding back a practical electric car is one thing – the power source. Everything else is mature off-the-shelf tech. We’ve been making cars for over 100 years, and electric motors longer than that. So until someone develops a battery capable of holding enough energy to drive the car for 350 miles, recharge in 10 minutes and last the life of the car…. or a fuel cell that doesn’t need enough platinum to stock Tiffanys…. electric cars need to stay in the labs. There’s just no point to any of the electrics or hybrids at this stage.