How about roll-up windows, manual locks, cloth seats, no nav system, no OnStar, no sunroof. Just a car. Make it $15,000 and they will sell hundreds of thousands to city and suburb dwellers.
A-men.
Uh, I think you’ve just reduced a $41,000 car to about $40,225. I highly doubt any of those things cost much at manufacturing quantities. If they did, there’d actually be an incentive to not put them in to reduce car prices, but you rarely see cars without them any more (well, cloth seats & no Nav/Onstar is pretty common, but still). It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that sunroofs are actually less expensive to manufacture than not having one (steel being more expensive than rubber and glass).
Either that, or it’s like the folks who said “make a cell phone that’s just a phone: no camera, gps, music player, etc.” They did, and no one bought them. There are several $15,000 cars available. How are they selling?
I have one. Of course it’s several years old but only 1 or two years before they stopped making simple ones.
“No one” wasn’t meant literally. So yeah, you were one of the very few who wanted “just a phone”. The overwhelming majority wanted bells and whistles.
And seriously, control-z, did you miss my entire point? The high price of the Volt is due to the electric car technology, not friggin’ GPS systems and sunroofs. There’s no freaking way they could make a brand new car with basically a complete redesign from how cars have been made for decades for only 15K. All the “frills” you keep sneering at have been quite common for a long time, meaning their costs have been pretty well minimized at this point.
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Ludovic: I’m sure you could find a handful of people who still want an analog cell phone, but not enough to make it worth it to keep propping up that old network.
control-z: So if you’re going to have an already high-priced car, you might as well spend maybe 2k more in giving some niceties. If there were no frills (like the things you mentioned), that may bring the price down to 35K. How many people are gonna want to spend 35K on the electric equivalent of a bare-bones Hyundai Accent? How about 30K? Still not enough people. 25K? Nope.
Just like any other new technology, niche or product. The initial product is expensive because it is a gamble and it cost a few buckets of money to develop. If it succeeds, the price comes down as most of the development and other up-front costs are paid off and production ramps up.
Hell, even Ranier Cherries, when they first hit the market around here a few years back, were running $8.99 or more per pound, and now they’re almost as cheap as the other cherries.
I understand what you are suggesting, but do you have figures to back up your assertion that the electric motor and batteries are why the price of the Volt is so high? Maybe the system costs $5,000, maybe it costs $15,000, who knows?
That attitude is why GM went bankrupt. It never developed an innovative solution because it isn’t market tested, because people don’t know what the want until they see it.
Look at Apple. Were people clamoring for MP3 players 10 years ago? For smart phones 5 years ago? For a tablet computer last year?
The government told GM to build an electric car and they build an electric car and it sucks because underlying problem is not that we need electric cars, but because we need vehicles that use less energy and the electric car isn’t the solution until we have a way to store electricity at high density and low cost. GM shouldn’t have been working on an electric car. They should have been working on better batteries, like IBM is doing with the Battery 500 Project.
The Volt is a serial hybrid that can use an ICU to charge the batteries and allow you to go much much further. Or just use the batteries for the commute and charge at home.
The Nissan Leaf does not have the ICU. That is the cost difference and the reason some folks would prefer the Volt.
It’s too bad that the Volt is not using a diesel engine to charge. But IMHO, Chevy is on more of the right track here.
The difference between the Leaf and the Volt is Apples to Oranges.
… you’re seriously saying GM went bankrupt for giving customers what they wanted? No one (okay, other than a few dirty hippies out there) really gave a crap about getting super high mpg in their cars* because gas was ridiculously cheap. When you could fill up your tank for $10, you didn’t give a shit if your car got 15mpg.
I’m not a fan of GM and never have been. They definitely have made some horrible, horrible business decisions. But the claim that giving customers what they want is one of them is moronic.
- and please, don’t bother replying with “WELL I KNOW THAT I WANTED A CAR THAT WAS ALL ELECTRIC AND GOT 200MPG IN 1987”. You are not representative of the American populace as a whole in this case.
Where do you live? Just about everywhere I’ve seen the Rainier cherries are a good deal more expensive than the regular ones.
I always wanted efficient cars; I have been concerned with oil depletion since 1985; I never thought oil was a good resource with which to utterly maximize consumption the way we have. The cheapness didn’t change things- we were in an oil glut you know.
Hey, I guess you didn’t bother to read my footnote in that post. Again: you are not representative of the (vast) majority of the American people. Hey, I friggin’ agree with you. I just don’t think that my minority opinion is gonna be catered to by a corporation who needs to make money. Corporations will target what will make them money. Most of the time, that means making what most people want.
YES. What you seem to be missing is that all of these products were on the edge of mega-hits, they ust needed someone to mass market them in a user-friendly manner. I had MP3 players long before the ipod came out. Most of them sucked. A lot of them used proprietary USB cables, or proprietary software, to transfer the music from the computer to the player. The whole industry was awash with crappy players. Apple came along and made one that, while a bit hoggy on the resources, worked fine for most people. They still used proprietary software to manage the player, but they expanded its functionality until it was basically a total music solution for the masses.
5 years ago Blackberries dominated the smartphone market. They had tiny little keys and a small screen and not much of a browser to speak of. The iphone was another game changer that made smartphone and internet technology available to people because they made it simple.
Only time will tell about the ipad, but companies have been trying to get tablet computing off the ground for years. Apple just might have made it work.
I am not an Apple fanboy by any means, but taking these 3 examples and saying it was all marketing is just bunk.
Do the dirty hippies put sugar in their porridge?
Only if it’s fair-trade organic turbinado sugar. Otherwise it’s organic raw agave nectar. Duh.
I read your footnote all right. I just thought obeying it came too close to being silenced by The Man 
So what we need is an iCar. Of course you can’t change the battery yourself, you can only get your gas at an AT&T gas station, the steering wheel will have to be held a certain way, and it will “revolutionaize drving”.
shrugs
My $15,000 car (as purchased new in 2006) has power locks, windows, mirrors and steering, has a/c, cruise control, side and front airbags, seats four, has a decent 6 speaker stereo/CD/MP3 player and a manual transmission. It even came with floormats and an arm rest! I opted for aluminum wheels, though, as I found the standard hubcaps downright fugly.
37-40mpg.
Scion Xa, ugly, but mine, paid for and economical and reliable. Scion xA - Wikipedia
They moved about 100,000 units between 2004 and 2008. The car was never built in America and I “made” my car and ordered it over the internet (which was a pretty cool experience), it was built in Japan and shipped overseas to America a month later.