Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
1–10 of 291 posts
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#2>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking.
That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#3>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking. That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.
The one part of this that I feel like I understand is that if you buy this vehicle you've effectively signed up for twice the maintenance expense. While I feel this was a brilliant step in the direction of stop gap between gas and electric vehicles; I could never bring myself to pull the trigger.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#4Even the Bolt that is replacing the Volt as their go-to-EV is still losing money per car sold (for now):
> An unnamed source cited by Bloomberg News estimates that General Motors is expected to take a loss of between US$8,000 and US$9,000 per Bolt sold. A GM spokesman first declined to comment on the expected profitability.[20] Opel refuted that in December 2016 and states that GM has battery cell costs of $130/kWh, and industry is not yet optimized for mass production.[21] A UBS teardown in 2017 suggested slightly smaller losses per vehicle, of $7418 on a base spec, or $5520 on a higher spec vehicle.[22]. They estimate that by 2025 the Bolt will make a profit of about $6000 per vehicle.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#5[deleted]
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#6>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking. That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.
For comparison consider that Tesla is selling about that many cars in a month, or that GM sold over 2,000,000 cars last year, so the Volt was only about 1% of their volume. Little sad though because it had some truly innovative engineering.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#7It's a true shame, as GM finally got the little details right on both how the engine was put together as well as the interior fit and finish on the 2017 model.
However, it was probably inevitable once batteries got good enough. Removing the combustion engine and replacing it with more batteries probably saves far too much money.
The current problem I have with electric vehicles is simply that right now they are "5 year" vehicles instead of "20 year" vehicles. Things are changing so quickly right now, that there is zero probability that any electric car I buy today I will have in 20 years. Contrast that to vehicles bought in the late 1990's/early 2000's that are still in decent shape (barring things like winters in the Northeast US) and still running.
And the whole "customers prefer SUV's" thing just drives me bonkers. Customers don't inherently prefer SUV's--the automakers market the hell out of SUV's because they are so profitable. And then everybody has a bunch of vehicles that they won't drive when gas goes up again.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#8>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking. That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.
The one part of this that I feel like I understand is that if you buy this vehicle you've effectively signed up for twice the maintenance expense. While I feel this was a brilliant step in the direction of stop gap between gas and electric vehicles; I could never bring myself to pull the trigger.
Why? Yes, there are more components than either a pure ICE or pure EV, but that doesn't translate to "twice the maintenance expense".
In my experience (we own a Pacifica PHEV), a PHEV means less expense than a 100% ICE vehicle, but more than a pure EV.
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#9>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking. That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.
The government committed to buy a certain amount of Volts and so did General Electric. It's estimated that there are government subsidies of $250,000 per car.
https://jalopnik.com/report-every-chevy-volt-has-over-250-00...
Re: Chevy Volt discontinued: Chevrolet's last Volt rolls off the assembly line
#10It's a true shame, as GM finally got the little details right on both how the engine was put together as well as the interior fit and finish on the 2017 model. However, it was probably inevitable once batteries got good enough. Removing the combustion engine and replacing it with more batteries probably saves far too much money. The current problem I have with electric vehicles is simply that right now they are "5 ye…
[deleted]