GM Ready To Reduce Volt Output
GM is ready to reduce output of the Volt plug-in hybrid. Wait, that’s putting it a bit harshly. GM is ready to “match supply and demand,” as GM vice chairman Steve Girsky told Reuters yesterday. GM wants to monitor sales for a few more months until the matching begins.
“I think it will be May or June before we really know if this thing has legs,” Girsky told Reuters. “We are prepared for it if it does.”
Last year, GM sold about 8,000 Volts, a little more than half of its annual target. This time, Girsky wisely excused himself from making forecasts.
As Reuters put it, “slow sales of the Volt would hardly make a dent in GM’s overall U.S. sales, which rose 13 percent to 2.5 million last year.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, GM now is “targeting 45,000 U.S. Volt sales in 2012. It also plans to export 15,000 of the Detroit-built cars to Europe.” Also according to the WSJ, the recent battery woes did not affect sales:
“General Motors Co. sold 1,529 battery-powered Chevrolet Volt cars last month, a 34% increase from November, amid a U.S. investigation into whether the car’s battery poses a fire risk.
More than one-third of those sales were to corporate fleets; a larger proportion than in previous months when about 10% of Volts were bought by corporate and other fleet customers.“
This tidbit had attracted accusations (see above) by people who claimed that GM is goosing the numbers with fleet sales. Not true, the WSJ says, the Volt’s fleet sales were so high because for the first time there are enough Volts to supply the fleets, and they are paying the same as a regular car buyers.
Sure.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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Those who knock the Volt do so because they know little about cars. The future is with Toyota, what a laugh! You'd think we live in Japan with all this hype to the point it becomes anti-American. If it were the truth that would be one thing, buts it's not. The Volt is by far a much better car than the Prius. There's really no comparison. Sure it's now more expensive, but so was the Prius when it first came out. So was the flat screen TV. Give the Volt time and you'll see that this is the car is the future and get us off the Mid East oil.
This web site is a circus run by clowns who are more interested in entertaining (in whichever way) the readership than imparting factual news to their readership. I'll also add the totally perverse attitude of some Americans to denigrate anything developed, designed and built in the US -- other than weapons, ignorance, and stupidity, all of which get heaps of praise, publicity and cheerleaders. I know of no other nation so inclined.
Working on the final design and pricing of a new Chevrolet dealership; it has a dedicated service bay and charging station for the Volt. Seems like a long term plan to keep it or something like it around for a while.
The Lundberg Survey, which tracks fuel prices, said last week that gas prices would need to reach $12.50 a gallon for the Volt to make sense purely on financial terms. It said the Leaf would be competitive with gas at $8.53 a gallon. Still, in a recent survey by Consumer Reports, the most satisfied drivers owned Volts. The survey said 93 percent of Volt owners would definitely buy the car again — though there are only 10,000 of the cars on the road. Happy with your VOLT? Have you ever been accused of being an utter FOOL?