I can show you 8,000 money losing Volts that GM recalled spent extra money modifying so they wouldn’t. Considering they’ve only sold 8,000 of them and it’s only been on the market a short time…
You’re just ignoring all those people who wreck their Volts, flip them upside down, then remain trapped in them for three weeks in their garage. Those folks are in danger.
Indeed, even conservatives that worked on it, can tell you that many are going too far on their complaints about this car:
Oh, my mistake. I thought you actually had a point to make.
This reminds me of the claims that CFL/LED bulbs don’t save energy because they need more energy and resources (and technology, giving a higher cost per unit of energy/resources) to make, but that isn’t true; that is already reflected in their initial costs. However, the energy savings over their lifetimes are far greater; even one that fails early, in as little as a few hundred hours for a CFL, can still save more overall.
As for the Volt, the margin likely isn’t as great once you factor in all of the costs and energy, including the total energy used to generate electricity (which may be 3 times the electricity itself; the car itself is much more efficient than an ICE car). Also, as long as fossil fuels generate most of our electricity, electric cars won’t reduce emissions much and may even increase emissions (supposedly, an ideal future world would use renewables for all energy, with electric cars being used not just for transportation but as a grid storage mechanism to balance out variations in wind/solar generation).
The point was obvious. GM recalled the Volt to make repairs regarding fire hazards. Considering there are so few of them on the road to have any kind of crash history this is extraordinary measures.
The Volt and the standard Prius are mid-size cars. What exactly do you do that requires a car larger than these?
I personally chose a Honda Fit because I decided that was the right size for me, and a Prius is larger than I needed. (If the Prius-C were available at that time, I would have gotten that instead.)
I’m not a big fan of the Volt per se, at least not at this price point, but it has also been the victim of a major disinformation campaign. And all that disinformation has hurt its sales. It’s been a highly effective disinformation campaign.
The “what were they thinking” is the long game. Despite the campaign rhetoric of certain politicians gas aint going go down to $2.50 let alone stay there. There will be ups and downs but overall it will be more ups and $4/gallon may seem like the good ole days in a few more years. Plenty of oil still to be had but what is there is more expensive to get at, and, after a pause due to a global recession, global demand is meanwhile going up. They saw an advantage to getting into the space earlier, even at an initial loss, and decided to take Tesla’s lead and go higher end first. They also believe that Americans will not accept a car that they cannot drive across the country, even though few actually do. Whether their thoughts are correct or incorrect time will tell, but that time is more five to ten years, not one or two.
If you consider a fire three weeks after a collision which totals the car to be a “hazard.” then I guess you might be correct. I submit that if you get into an accident which breaches the battery of a Volt, and rescue/EMTs aren’t able to get you out of there in three weeks, well, you’ve got bigger problems. Like being already dead.
hauling stuff around is why the people I know with Prius’s have larger cars. I actually have a smaller can than a Prius (Saturn) but I tow with it. I’ve also hauled a fair amount of lumber with the fold down seats but you probably could do that with a Prius.
What I considered is that GM spent money fixing a problem that an armchair internet engineer doesn’t think exists.
Car companies have a long history of doing that very thing, even when it is later deemed unnecessary. See: Ford Pinto, Audi 5000, Toyota Camry, Chevrolet Corvair, et al. In every case it was later determined that it was user error or that the problem in question did not make the car any less safe than its contemporaries. The problem is that public opinion doesn’t care about any of that, they only know that the Pinto blew up at the slightest provocation, Audis and Toyotas accelerate on their own, and Corvairs are “unsafe at any speed”. It doesn’t matter that none of these things are true, but in the court of public opinion they are absolute certainties. Which is why manufacturers now go to great lengths to “fix” the “problem”, because to do nothing only inflames the situation further, costs sales, and damages reputations. Of course GM was going to do something, even though the situation could only be induced under very extraordinary and fairly obvious circumstances.
Ford had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make changes to the Pinto and that was after a number of public deaths. It was a $2 part. Most recalls are the result of demonstrated problems after the fact and that’s the long history of how things were done.
GM spent the money before anything happened publicly. If it wasn’t a problem they wouldn’t have fixed it. And from a historical point, they would have fixed it after the fact. The evidence that it needed to be fixed is that they fixed it.
Of some trivial significance, I test-drove a Prius today. It was okay, but there was this miniature LCD display on the dash that had a lot of distractingly annoying animations on it, not something I’m eager to drive with.
That seems to be the trend. Not sure why. I’m guessing some of it is to help people hyper-drive it for economic purposes.
Just for clarity, I’ve been slamming GM for building the car because they have a fiduciary responsibility to make money and repay loans. The car itself is exciting because it represents what we will be driving in the future. I’ve even been tinkering with the idea of building a budget electric car for work. Sadly I lack the funds for even that.
I think the Volt (as a car) lacks a few things and a profitable car company should develop it in the background and wait for batteries to catch up.
I don’t see waiting for the batteries. I can understand other companies doing that, but somebody had to be first. And while many of our advances in battery technology have been driven by electronics, I think it’s a good thing to actually have a few cars out there to push the development. There’s the Volt and the Leaf and the various Teslas. All have their niche but at least they are actually being sold with a nationwide campaign. That’s more than you can say for something like the EV-1.
Well for the sake of clarity GM has paid off its loans already. And they are, even with losing something investing in the future with the Volt, making money, more than they ever have.
Of course its loans were not much compared to the investment that our government made on our behalf. And it is perception about where GM will be in that future that drives the value of that investment, more than this year’s profit. IF you and GM are right that the car “represents what we will be driving in the future” then it may be serving that long term investment well.
Well for starters, your own cite shows it hasn’t paid back it’s loans by half. And even when the loans are paid back the taxpayer is still on the hook until federally purchased stock is sold at breakeven.
We’ve had this conversation before. There is no knew technology in the car. They reconfigured the same technology in the Prius and added more batteries. Aside from the fact that it’s a hybrid with the largest battery pack on the market (making it an extended range hybrid) it doesn’t represent a breakthrough. It’s not a bad argument to make that they are fronting long term investments now but they have a really bad track record doing this. IMO, it’s better that they do it right then do it first. It “appears” to be a very nice car. God help the US hybrid market if it turns out to be another mechanical failure like the Olds diesel. This car is GM’s flagship car.
Now I don’t know why the rapid charge battery technology hasn’t hit the market yet since it’s been sitting on the technology shelf but that is one of the variables that I think will rapidly push the car into mainstream market. That and a reduction in cost/weight of batteries.
And we had this conversation before, the Volt has new technology as the Canadians and others can tell you.
Voltec Propulsion System Named 2012 Best New Technology
You can turn that off.