There has been quite a bit of press lately about electric cars. The Personal Journal (yes, the same section of the WSJ I made fun of the other day) has an installment which features GM’s former CEO Robert Stempel, who had spent much of his career around this technology, and is coincidentally the same guy who approved GM’s famous EV1, the car which prompted the documentary “Who killed the electric car?”….he offers, as the article puts it, “some sobering words” which were not captured in this documentary.
“The business side of the case wasn’t there. The EV1 was too expensive…We were way off the cost target,”
Well that wasn’t clear to the users at the time, but in hindsight the cars were offered through a leasing program, where GM clearly didn’t recoup the cost of the car through the monthly lease payments. Honda is doing something very similar with their fuel cell vehicle.
Stempel also discusses how the commodity boom has negatively affected the pricing of the raw materials needed to make these contraptions work. Unfortunately, it looks like he is on the mark…
The GM Volt plug-in hybrid was supposed to hit showrooms in 2010 for $30,000. Well, apparently it’s not that easy to redesign wipers, stereos and other electrical accessories so they drain as little juice as possible from the battery. GM has announced that the first generation Volt will be “closer to $35,000?. The good news is that the late 2010 deadline hasn’t been officially pushed back, though GM says that if it can’t make it, the car might be delayed until the Spring of 2011.
-Treehugger.com
Well, that kind of sucks. I hope $35,000 is still cost effective for a plug-in hybrid. I am, however, curious to see what GM’s estimates are for the actual fuel economy of the Volt (once you use the 40 miles worth of electricity).
Luckily for us, GM is one of the worst run companies ever. They haven’t been profitable since 2004, and if it weren’t for continual government support, they’d be gone by now. That should offer a sigh of relief, since Honda and Toyota haven’t rushed their electric cars into production, and have enough of a life line to get this thing right…with time.
In last week’s edition of The Economist, they had an article about the future of SUVs. I saw a staggering statistic about how both the car dealer and manufacturer make better margins on the sale of 1 SUV than they do on the sale of nearly 10 compact cars (this was by no means a scientific study, it was coming from a car salesman). Still, if that number resembles anything close to reality, I think that is a pretty good reason why we see so many SUVs on the road; the sales people have monetary incentive (the best kind) to sell SUVs. Predatory salesmanship, anyone? 
