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Volt production on hold for 5 weeks

That's because the Ampera costs €43 000+ (that's $57 000+ !!!). WTF? It's insane, the price is almost double that in the US! :twisted:
I don't get. :confused:

Cars in Europe generally cost much more than in the US, even European marques. A Golf, for example, starts at $17,995 in the US, but here in Spain it starts at €18,820 ($24,839).

Car use and ownership has always been quite different either side of the Atlantic. Hicup asked who drives a 12-year-old car and here I'd guess about a third of cars on the road will be at least 10 years old. People keep their cars a long time and drive them until they start to cost more to repair than they are worth. I drive a 12 year old car and it is starting to show its age but is still economical, runs great and has never let me down. I will probably change it this year, but buy a second-hand car of about 4-5 years old with about 30,000 miles on the clock. I'll drive that one too until it starts to let me down. I don't think it will be American though. I believe that they start to fall apart after 3-4 years. It'll be Japanese, European or Korean. Cars built to last.
 
Then why exactly are we subsidizing 10k of the sticker? If thats the demographic they dont need the subsidy, they ought to be ready to pay a higher price for a ****in status symbol.

You're not subsidizing anything. Buyers get a tax credit to help increase sales. Eventually the cars will become cheaper and more affordable. Sooner ir later we're going to need to wean ourselves from oil, and the Volt and cars like it will help.
 
Electric cars aren't that more environmentally friendly anyway, since where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels mostly, we need to find another energy source, not just rearrange how we power things.

It only takes 16 kWh to fully charge a Volt or around $1.60-$1.80 which is good for 35 miles. Try to get that kind of economy from a gas engine. It's almost half of a car that gets 50 mpg.
 
Electric cars aren't that more environmentally friendly anyway, since where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels mostly, we need to find another energy source, not just rearrange how we power things.

Hydro, nuclear, wind, solar... But even if it is fossil burning, it's much easier to put a filter on the factory chimney than on the exhaust of every car. Well, at least we won't breathe dirty air in the city with EVs. I also think we will soon discover cheap electricity sources and technologies. ;)

Cars in Europe generally cost much more than in the US, even European marques. A Golf, for example, starts at $17,995 in the US, but here in Spain it starts at €18,820 ($24,839).

Yeah, makes me wonder.
My VW is 14 years old too but it's more like a toy to me, especially now with these gas prices in Europe. :roll:
 
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You're not subsidizing anything. Buyers get a tax credit to help increase sales. Eventually the cars will become cheaper and more affordable. Sooner ir later we're going to need to wean ourselves from oil, and the Volt and cars like it will help.

orly?

Gov’t subsidies for Chevy Volt up to $250,000 per car? « Hot Air

Chevy Volt Costing Taxpayers Up to $250K Per Vehicle [Michigan Capitol Confidential]
links embedded in story:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/recovery/pdfs/battery_awardee_list.pdf 100million
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/archives/fpi/mega/GM-9-23-08-BM.pdf another 100million
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/archives/fpi/mega/Compact_Power-4-14-09-BM.pdf 100 million to the battery supplier
Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Hohman looked at total state and federal assistance offered for the development and production of the Chevy Volt, General Motors’ plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. His analysis included 18 government deals that included loans, rebates, grants and tax credits. The amount of government assistance does not include the fact that General Motors is currently 26 percent owned by the federal government. …

GM has estimated they’ve sold 6,000 Volts so far. That would mean each of the 6,000 Volts sold would be subsidized between $50,000 and $250,000, depending on how many government subsidy milestones are realized.

If battery manufacturers awarded incentives to produce batteries the Volt may use are included in the analysis, the potential government subsidy per Volt increases to $256,824. For example, A123 Systems has received extensive state and federal support, and bid to be a supplier to the Volt, but the deal instead went to Compact Power. The $256,824 figure includes adding up the subsidies to both companies.

The $3 billion total subsidy figure includes $690.4 million offered by the state of Michigan and $2.3 billion in federal money. That’s enough to purchase 75,222 Volts with a sticker price of $39,828.

Keep fooling yourself, there is plenty of corporatism involved if its a cause Obama likes. Btw whatever happened to the liberal idea that tax breaks werent ok, you guys seem to hate it when oil is involved.
 
Volt production on hold for 5 weeks | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

Basic laws of supply and demand dictate the demand just isn't there, despite the average gallon of gas today hitting $3.47 per gallon in the U.S. The cost (ie., math) of the Volt just doesn't work out until maybe gas is around $5.00 + a gallon. In a related note, the Detroit Hamtramck plan was visited by the President in 2010, adding to a possible meme that if the President visits, bad things happen. Let's hope the people put out of work by this slow down, are hired back quickly.

If us tax payers were not subsidizing this so called car they would have sold about three.
 
It was the wrong answer to a good question. The only thing it does well is short trips and it's too expensive for that type of car. You pretty much have to have a garage also. That is going to be a major limitation for a good while. People that live in apts don't have access to a garage for a recharge. I have my 56 Pontiac and three motorcycles in ours. To recharge one I'd have to run an extension cord. It's not going to happen.

The car gets pretty average mileage while not running on the battery because of the weight of the battery.

They should have perhaps made it a limited option for a Hybrid while they worked on battery technology. You can't make people buy what doesn't work very well for them especially at these costs. People are buying the Prius because it makes sense and works for them.

People have been begging for GM to offer a 1500 series truck with a small diesel and for some reason they refuse to do it. Go figure.
 
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49 billion of our tax dollars and this is the best GM can come up with? What a joke. GM should have filed for bankruptcy. Buy a Ford, they didn't take corporatre welfare. In a related story yesterday our president apparently didn't get the memo that GM was shutting down production of the volt. At a UAW fundraiser for him President Obama brought up a sore subject when he talked about the Volt. Said he was going to buy one. What a moron.
 
49 billion of our tax dollars and this is the best GM can come up with? What a joke. GM should have filed for bankruptcy. Buy a Ford, they didn't take corporatre welfare. In a related story yesterday our president apparently didn't get the memo that GM was shutting down production of the volt. At a UAW fundraiser for him President Obama brought up a sore subject when he talked about the Volt. Said he was going to buy one. What a moron.

As of right now they are only suspending production because the inventory is high. Will they decide to not continue production in 3 months? We will have to see.
 
Electric cars aren't that more environmentally friendly anyway, since where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels mostly, we need to find another energy source, not just rearrange how we power things.

Kryptonite is the answer. In the mean time drill baby drill.
 
As of right now they are only suspending production because the inventory is high. Will they decide to not continue production in 3 months? We will have to see.

And why is inventory high? Because people don't want to buy the over priced unpracticle volt. Only suspending production for three months. Tell that to the families of the furloughed workers. Let them eat ramon noodles. Personally I refuse to buy a vehicle from GM (government motors).
 
And why is inventory high? Because people don't want to buy the over priced unpracticle volt. Only suspending production for three months. Tell that to the families of the furloughed workers. Let them eat ramon noodles. Personally I refuse to buy a vehicle from GM (government motors).

There are many who feel that way. It's another reason why GM should have simply went through a structured more conventional bankruptcy and started over from there. People have overlooked the costs that don't have a $$ in front of it.
 
orly?

Gov’t subsidies for Chevy Volt up to $250,000 per car? « Hot Air

Chevy Volt Costing Taxpayers Up to $250K Per Vehicle [Michigan Capitol Confidential]
links embedded in story:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/recovery/pdfs/battery_awardee_list.pdf 100million
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/archives/fpi/mega/GM-9-23-08-BM.pdf another 100million
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/archives/fpi/mega/Compact_Power-4-14-09-BM.pdf 100 million to the battery supplier


Keep fooling yourself, there is plenty of corporatism involved if its a cause Obama likes. Btw whatever happened to the liberal idea that tax breaks werent ok, you guys seem to hate it when oil is involved.

First, the article starts off by saying MAY have... The first hmmmmmm?
Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether
Then it says it's unlikely to ever receive all the $3 billion it touted in the beginning. Guess that blows his math all to hell.
It’s unlikely that all the companies involved in Volt production will ever receive all the $3 billion in incentives, Hohman said
Finally we get down to the meat of the article...coulda...woulda...well, maybe. What a joke of an article.
But the analysis looks at the total value that has been offered to the Volt in different aspects of production


In the third link there are lots of awards given to manufacturers that are NOT Volt exclusive, most are generic battery producers, such as Saft America, Inc. for production of lithium-ion cells, modules, and battery packs for industrial and agricultural vehicles and defense application markets. Last I looked the Volt wasn't an industrial, agricultural or defense vehicle.

Or how about Allison Transmission, Inc. to to manufacture hybrid systems for the commercial truck market. Is the Volt now a commercial truck?

Then there's the Ford Motor Company (Ford subsidy for a GM Volt???) to produce a Ford electric drive transaxle with integrated power electronics in an existing Ford transmission facility.


And on and on. To say that the Volt is subsidized by as much as $250,000 each using these state and federal incentives is sensationalism at it's best.
 
Then why exactly are we subsidizing 10k of the sticker? If thats the demographic they dont need the subsidy, they ought to be ready to pay a higher price for a ****in status symbol.

I don't necessarily think that subsidizing the sticker price of the Volt is the best way to go about it. It's not so much that the target demographic itself needs the subsidy, it's more a matter of wanting to subsidize the development of electric cars (which I totally support). Since gas-guzzlers generate a lot of economic externalities that are not paid for by the consumer (e.g. pollution, unrest in the Middle East, oil-based economic swings, etc) it is definitely in the government's interest to encourage the transition to cleaner automobiles as soon as possible. Perhaps a better way to go about it would be for the government to just subsidize the R&D directly, instead of subsidizing the cars themselves.
 
Electric cars aren't that more environmentally friendly anyway, since where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels mostly, we need to find another energy source, not just rearrange how we power things.

No, but a lot of electric plants supplement their power production by non-traditional means, and more will as time goes on. Power station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sure most of it comes from fossil fuel, but in a combustion engine, all of it comes from fossil fuel, and that can't change. With an electric motor, the plant can change it's fuel and it's irrelevant to the car. So if you get energy from a plant that only uses fossil fuel, then you have a fossil burning car, just like everyone else, but if they start getting a power draw from a nuclear plant, then you have a nuclear car. If they use a wind farm for supplement power production, then you have a wind car. To the car, the original fuel source is out of the equation.

That's important now, and will become more important in the future.

If us tax payers were not subsidizing this so called car they would have sold about three.

Tax breaks are used for a lot of things. Draw business to areas with weak economies, for example. No reason they shouldn't be used to spur investment into necessary new technology. It's the main reason we fund NASA, after all.
 
Electric cars aren't that more environmentally friendly anyway, since where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels mostly, we need to find another energy source, not just rearrange how we power things.

Yes, but it's a lot easier to make them greener once they're plugged into the grid. Then it's just a matter of how we generate electricity, rather than designing completely new engine technologies. I think that the transition from gas engines to electric power is a much bigger technological breakthrough than the transition from (for example) inefficient solar panels to slightly more efficient solar panels. You're right that electric cars probably aren't THAT much greener than regular cars right now, but they will be by the time they become mainstream. This is because the cost of solar energy is rapidly falling and will soon approach cost parity with fossil fuels, at least in the sunny parts of the country.
 
Yes, but it's a lot easier to make them greener once they're plugged into the grid. Then it's just a matter of how we generate electricity, rather than designing completely new engine technologies. I think that the transition from gas engines to electric power is a much bigger technological breakthrough than the transition from (for example) inefficient solar panels to slightly more efficient solar panels. You're right that electric cars probably aren't THAT much greener than regular cars right now, but they will be by the time they become mainstream. This is because the cost of solar energy is rapidly falling and will soon approach cost parity with fossil fuels, at least in the sunny parts of the country.

What about highley toxic lithium batteries? The process of manufacture of millions of cells in itself creates a problem for the enviorment not to mention the disposal issue of said cells. I also have a problem with wind turbines they are killing thousands of birds of prey. Most every type of alternative enegy has a down side. My crazy sister says the only hope for earth is the extinction of the human race.
 
The Volt, and just about all other hybrid and electric cars, cost a LOT to own. Sure, they get good gas economy. But how long do the batteries last, before they gotta be replaced? And how hard are those batteries to replace? And how much do they cost? Tally that in with the sale price, which is quite high for these things, and then toss in the fact that you can't really do any of your own maintenance on these types of cars, and what do you get? You get a car that costs as much as a Ferrarri to own. Not to BUY, but to OWN. Cheaper to just buy a BMW diesel...or a Jag, or VW, or Mercedes...all diesels, all with GREAT fuel economy, all with incredibly long service life, and all decent sized, luxury cars. Cept some of the VWs...but hey, I'd take a golf TDI over a Nissan Leaf, or hybrid anything, any day, save a TON of cash on both gas and upkeep, and on sticker price...AND it's faster, more reliable, more fun to drive, better range, and better looking.
 
What about highley toxic lithium batteries? The process of manufacture of millions of cells in itself creates a problem for the enviorment not to mention the disposal issue of said cells.

This is true. However, that's a relatively minor problem compared to the pollution of gasoline. Once we get to the point where we can affordably plug our cars in to an electric grid that mostly relies on renewable energy, the net impact on our environment will be overwhelmingly positive.

I also have a problem with wind turbines they are killing thousands of birds of prey. Most every type of alternative enegy has a down side. My crazy sister says the only hope for earth is the extinction of the human race.

Solar energy has no serious environmental drawbacks as far as I know. None that are significant relative to other types of energy anyway. I think that solar is going to be the main energy source soon; wind power will never be more than a fraction of our energy supply since it takes up so much space to generate a comparatively small amount of energy.
 
The Volt, and just about all other hybrid and electric cars, cost a LOT to own. Sure, they get good gas economy. But how long do the batteries last, before they gotta be replaced? And how hard are those batteries to replace? And how much do they cost? Tally that in with the sale price, which is quite high for these things, and then toss in the fact that you can't really do any of your own maintenance on these types of cars, and what do you get? You get a car that costs as much as a Ferrarri to own. Not to BUY, but to OWN. Cheaper to just buy a BMW diesel...or a Jag, or VW, or Mercedes...all diesels, all with GREAT fuel economy, all with incredibly long service life, and all decent sized, luxury cars. Cept some of the VWs...but hey, I'd take a golf TDI over a Nissan Leaf, or hybrid anything, any day, save a TON of cash on both gas and upkeep, and on sticker price...AND it's faster, more reliable, more fun to drive, better range, and better looking.

I don't know about the Volt but the Prius warranties the battery for 100,000 miles.

Maintenance costs on diesels are pretty high. On the new VW's you have to use the specified synthetic oil to maintain your warranty. Indeed, I would not want to replace a Hybrid battery but the Prius is a good affordable car.
 
I don't know about the Volt but the Prius warranties the battery for 100,000 miles.

Maintenance costs on diesels are pretty high. On the new VW's you have to use the specified synthetic oil to maintain your warranty. Indeed, I would not want to replace a Hybrid battery but the Prius is a good affordable car.

They warranty that battery pack for 100K miles, OR 8 years. Same as the drive train on most cars sold in the US, more or less. Difference being, a rechargeable battery slowly loses it's ability to hold a charge over time. Meaning, while not so important in a hybrid...in an all electric car, you're range gets lower for every year you own it, until you replace it.

Diesels are only expensive to maintain if you have to pay someone else to work on it...not a lot of diesel shops around. But it's not much different from a gas motor, and again, they run forever. It's no big thing to have a diesel with will over 350K miles on it...do that in a gas motor, and it's like Jesus Christ came back.

The reason why you have to use specific oil to retain the warranty on diesels, be it a BMW, VW, OR merc, is because....people are stupid. You take that car to the typical Jiffy Lube, they are gonna put in standard oil, the same they put in all other cars...never even noticing it's a diesel. And some shade tree mechanics who own them will do the same. Which will VERY QUICKLY result in huge build ups in the ports and valves...

The Prius is only a good affordable car if you don't mind paying mid size sedan prices for an economy class car. It's fuel economy, upkeep, and everything else pales to many of the diesels currently running around in Europe.
 
I don't think the idea itself is a bad one... the subsidizing, excessive cost and inability to produce such a vehicle at say $23,000 to $28,000 (28K being fully loaded) is the problem. If that were the cost, the car would sell like hotcakes assuming no major or catastrophic design or mechanical faults existed.

Just like anything else that is new off the production line. Take a look at computers, how much did they cost 20 years ago compared to now and look how much better they are. I think that you want to beat up something that is way to new to beat up on. If Chevrolet was making electric production cars 10 + years and you were pointing out this I could see this.

I can see the point your trying to make but its just to early to hang it out to dry. You will need to see where it is in a decade or to of having production cars of this sort to actually have a case.
 
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