Chevy Volt sales triple
JonnyPistachio
Florida Posts: 10,219
What are your thoughts on this car? Anyone have one, or know someone who does?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/03/autos/c ... ?hpt=hp_t3
Chevy Volt sales are cranking up. General Motors sold three times as many Chevrolet Volts in 2012 as it did in 2011, which was the car's first full year on the market.
GM sold 23,461 Volts in 2012 compared with just 7,671 in 2011. While it's an impressive jump, the Volt is still one of Chevy's lowest-selling cars. However, the Volt greatly outdid the Corvette, for instance, of which only 14,000 were sold last year.
Its 2012 sales also put the Volt well ahead of its nearest competitor, the Nissan Leaf. Nissan sold about 9,800 Leafs in 2012, an increase of just 1.5% over 2011.
The single biggest factor driving the sales increase, according to both GM and industry analysts, was the Volt's increased popularity in car-clogged California. Sales there jumped thanks to a few engineering tweaks that made the Volt eligible for California's highly desirable carpool lane stickers for the first time.
"More than half of all Volt sales are in California," said Alec Guitierrez, an analyst with Kelley Blue Book. The car has also been catching on in other markets, however, including Michigan and in the Chicago area, according to GM.
Besides the carpool lane stickers, the Volt has also been helped by aggressive leasing incentives offered in 2012. Last year, GM was offering the car for $289 a month with a $2,800 down payment. That was far less than a car with the Volt's nearly $40,000 purchase price would ordinarily lease for, even factoring in a $7,500 plug-in car tax credit.
"The math on the Volt starts to make sense to the masses at those prices," said Jesse Toprak, an analyst with the auto pricing Web site Truecar.com.
Chevy Volt owners routinely report getting triple-digit gas mileage, according to the Web site Voltstats.net.
While even those fuel savings might not make up the car's relatively high cost at full sticker price, the low lease rates made the Volt's price more comparable to ordinary fully-gasoline-powered cars.
Following a full charge, the Volt can drive about 38 miles on plug-in electric power, according to EPA estimates, before a gasoline engine switches on to generate power for further driving.
The Volt faced some serious sales challenges in 2012, pointed out Tom Libby, an auto sales analyst with Polk. At the beginning of the year, GM voluntarily recalled the cars to fix a battery packaging problem that could, in some unusual crash circumstances, lead to a fire risk. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration later closed its investigation finding that the Volt, even before the recall, had posed no greater fire risk than other cars. Even so, said Libby, news of the investigation and recall caused significant negative publicity for the car which seems to have now been overcome.
Regardless of the good news, Libby said, it still bears remembering that sales of the Volt, which is now the best-selling plug-in car in America, are still miniscule compared to most other cars. In 2012, Chevrolet dealers sold almost exactly 10 times as many of the Chevrolet Cruze, the gasoline powered car on which the Volt is based.
"They realize the need to do better," he said.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/03/autos/c ... ?hpt=hp_t3
Chevy Volt sales are cranking up. General Motors sold three times as many Chevrolet Volts in 2012 as it did in 2011, which was the car's first full year on the market.
GM sold 23,461 Volts in 2012 compared with just 7,671 in 2011. While it's an impressive jump, the Volt is still one of Chevy's lowest-selling cars. However, the Volt greatly outdid the Corvette, for instance, of which only 14,000 were sold last year.
Its 2012 sales also put the Volt well ahead of its nearest competitor, the Nissan Leaf. Nissan sold about 9,800 Leafs in 2012, an increase of just 1.5% over 2011.
The single biggest factor driving the sales increase, according to both GM and industry analysts, was the Volt's increased popularity in car-clogged California. Sales there jumped thanks to a few engineering tweaks that made the Volt eligible for California's highly desirable carpool lane stickers for the first time.
"More than half of all Volt sales are in California," said Alec Guitierrez, an analyst with Kelley Blue Book. The car has also been catching on in other markets, however, including Michigan and in the Chicago area, according to GM.
Besides the carpool lane stickers, the Volt has also been helped by aggressive leasing incentives offered in 2012. Last year, GM was offering the car for $289 a month with a $2,800 down payment. That was far less than a car with the Volt's nearly $40,000 purchase price would ordinarily lease for, even factoring in a $7,500 plug-in car tax credit.
"The math on the Volt starts to make sense to the masses at those prices," said Jesse Toprak, an analyst with the auto pricing Web site Truecar.com.
Chevy Volt owners routinely report getting triple-digit gas mileage, according to the Web site Voltstats.net.
While even those fuel savings might not make up the car's relatively high cost at full sticker price, the low lease rates made the Volt's price more comparable to ordinary fully-gasoline-powered cars.
Following a full charge, the Volt can drive about 38 miles on plug-in electric power, according to EPA estimates, before a gasoline engine switches on to generate power for further driving.
The Volt faced some serious sales challenges in 2012, pointed out Tom Libby, an auto sales analyst with Polk. At the beginning of the year, GM voluntarily recalled the cars to fix a battery packaging problem that could, in some unusual crash circumstances, lead to a fire risk. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration later closed its investigation finding that the Volt, even before the recall, had posed no greater fire risk than other cars. Even so, said Libby, news of the investigation and recall caused significant negative publicity for the car which seems to have now been overcome.
Regardless of the good news, Libby said, it still bears remembering that sales of the Volt, which is now the best-selling plug-in car in America, are still miniscule compared to most other cars. In 2012, Chevrolet dealers sold almost exactly 10 times as many of the Chevrolet Cruze, the gasoline powered car on which the Volt is based.
"They realize the need to do better," he said.
Pick up my debut novel here on amazon: Jonny Bails Floatin (in paperback) (also available on Kindle for $2.99)
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
The U.S. military's newspaper, Stars & Stripes, recently reported that the Pentagon is buying Chevy Volts in a 1,500 electric-vehicle purchase, as part of the Defense Department's "green initiatives," which seek to reduce the country's dependence on foreign energy sources.
A recent Congressional Budget Office study challenged the assumption that electric vehicles have any impact on such dependence, prompting the question of why the government is spending money this way. Against the backdrop of the attack on our embassy in Benghazi, and looming embassy security cuts due to sequestration, it appears politics and ideology are trumping common sense.
A little poking around the web raises additional questions about government Volt purchases. A State Department contract from March of this year details the purchase of a Chevy Volt for $47,500 for use at a U.S. embassy in Norway. The sticker price for a 2013 model year is $39,145 (before the $7,500 tax credit upon individual purchase). Obviously the government doesn't get a tax credit because it's not an individual income tax filer. But it left me wondering, why did the State Department pay $47,500 instead of $39,145? Why did they pay an extra $8,000?
Then I noticed that the State Department also paid over $108,000 for another contract, dated May of this year, for a Volt-specific charging station at our embassy in Vienna, Austria. But according to GM's Volt FAQ site ("Charging" --> "Charging station -- Preparing for your Volt"):
Every Volt comes standard with a 120V portable charge cord that can plug into most common household outlets and will fully charge a Volt in about 10 hours, depending on outdoor temperature. You can also have a 240V charging station (additional cost plus installation) professionally installed in your home that will reduce the charging time to about four hours.
Even if a consumer needs an electrical converter, the 240V dedicated charging stations cost, at most, around $2,000 (and guess what? consumers get tax credits for these, too). What did the embassy spend the extra $100K on?
And this is where it actually starts to get ridiculous. The State Department also recently threw a big party (photos of two Chevy Volts at the event here) to celebrate the "greening" of the American Embassy in Vienna. There's actually a "League of Green Embassies" website.
As it relates to Benghazi consulate security, sequestration will gut $129 million from embassy security, maintenance and construction budgets. The State Department should be devoting its sure-to-dwindle resources to security guards and/or equipment in order to prevent a repeat of the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and the others in Libya.
These Chevy Volt-related purchases are symbols of misguided Obama administration priorities. I'm sure these two embassies aren't the only places the government has spent money on environmental idealism instead of practical security measures.
http://nlpc.org/cached/embassies-facing ... volts.html
GM is such a piece of crap company, it's not a question of if but when this dog goes bankrupt once again.