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GM is planning on resuming Chevrolet Volt production a week early, shortening the planned five week shutdown to four weeks. The shutdown began March 19th, but GM began notifying workers on Wednesday.
The Volt now has a 61 day supply, with levels as high as 154 days at the end of February. GM is also looking to boost sales by 30 percent, while European sales of both the Volt and the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera get underway. The Volt will now qualify for the HOV lane in California, considered a major draw for motorists using the state’s congested freeways. GM is targeting 3,000 or more sales in the coming months in the United States
30 Comments on “GM Says Chevrolet Volt Production To Resume A Week Early...”
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Just peachy. Yet another TTAC article on how wonderful the Volt is and how well it is selling. How much did GM pay you guys to reprint this press release for them, huh?
Hehehehe, dat was a good one!
Don’t worry the Volt will be fine. Just a few start up bumps in the road.
It is right to match production with demand, but this highly reactionary behavior by GM makes me wonder if we’ll keep getting a steady diet of roller-coaster Volt production news.
My theory is that higher gas prices will actually hurt Volt sales due to people having less money to spend on a car. Perhaps March sales jumped due to people spending their income tax returns. I’ll be impressed if they stay above 2000/month, but I doubt it.
To put it exceptionally mildly, GM has not been doing a very good job of messaging with the Volt. Between the inscrutable, dopey ads, the overshooting of the battery, closure announcements etc, they’ve been staggering around like Sideshow Bob and stepping on a s**t-ton of rakes.
Me, I don’t really care how many they make, except insofar as the population of charger users doesn’t grow to the point that I get crowded out of my ‘free’ charges.. But it would be nice to have a large enough population that they start getting performance parts from GM or Via, such as quicker motors or shorter gearing (combined with the generator motor spinning the ring gear at lower speeds to entallen the ratio, like it does at highway speeds)..
The knee-jerk adjustments are mostly the result of the plant building only one product. Once they add others (later this year), it will smooth out. If you wanna hate, go for it. This is really basic common sense, though.
The fact that it can be driven solo in the California carpool lanes will provide a bump in sales all by itself.
Folks underestimate the value of the volt for GM. Imagine the value of the Volt owners mailing list. Folks willing to pay for a Volt would probably be open to all sorts of purchases.
Eventually Volt owners may have a private shopping channel! Blue topaz 90% off today only! Only 3000 left!
Announcer: Hey we have Mary from Columbus on the line. Mary, how many topaz rings did you buy?
Mary: I bought 6 for my grand kids! They are going to love them! Oh hold on, my garage is on fire again….
Magnificent! Understated and sensitive too, for what you didn’t come right out and say. Fortunately, Volt buyers won’t be put out. Kind of like how Patrick Ewing was never troubled by the ‘Pat Ewing Can’t Read!’ signs held up by opposing fans when he was at Georgetown.
Most Volt owners are in a bit higher socioeconomic class than the denizens of QVC or the Knife Channel. My cousin bought a Volt and he is, as they say, of means.
Did you know that Pintos didn’t catch fire any more frequently than other cars of that era? Ford got caught with a “smoking gun” memo from an engineer who had proposed an improvement, but in real life, you weren’t any more likely to die a fiery death in a Pinto than you were in a Vega or, for the matter, in a larger car of the times.
No Volts in private hands have caught fire. One crash tested Volt burned three weeks later. Did you know that when they crash test conventional cars and truck they are drained of fuel? They also disconnect the 12V battery. If they followed the same protocols with conventional cars when crash tested as they did with the Volt, they’d have fires regularly from leaking fuel and sparks.
Meanwhile Ferrari 458s, Mini Coopers and Ford Escapes have been recalled for real life fire safety issues, each involving numerous fires, some of which took place when the cars were parked.
So he has lots of money and bought a volt? Sweet. QVC wouldn’t fleece him fast enough. He gets the Aspen timeshare presentations.
If you buy 2 weeks, you get the third at 4% off!! and we have outlets installed for your volt! Your gonna love it!
If he has a vacation home, it’s probably owned free and clear. Though not worth hundreds of millions, he’s a third generation millionaire. His family may be political liberals but they are very conservative with money. He’s a technology enthusiast and made some money on some internet businesses in addition to family assets. My late uncle and my uncle’s father were both successful businessmen/lawyers with real estate investments and banking businesses. Because gifts under $10,000 are not taxed, and because he was married with two kids and his parents were divorced, when his kids were little my cousin started out every year with $80K deposited in the bank. His father was an old-school mortgage banker, he’s not going to buy a timeshare. He’s more likely to have an investment in the real estate trust that developed the building.
So, he really didn’t need $7500 in assistance to buy a $40K car?
“So, he really didn’t need $7500 in assistance to buy a $40K car?”
I’d like to see the IRS means test that 7500 dollar giveaway, people of means don’t need our money to buy what they can afford easily.
Last week ttac reported the added down week. consider yourself well informed for discussion during your Easter Sunday gathering.
How many Volts per dealership would that work out too? How many Prius(4-door)? How many Leaf?
Ever since they started deliver Volts to California that are carpool-lane approved, they can’t keep them on the lots for too many days. Prospective buyers had been waiting for this over a year. In the meantime, they bought LEAFs instead. No longer. Chevrolet will sell over 10,000 Volts in California alone this year. I went to four dealers in the last week and could only find a couple at each dealership, and many of them were already spoken for. Dealers said they could sell many more, if Chevrolet just bothered sending them more. I don’t know why they don’t send more Volts to where the demand is, i.e., California. These deliveries started about a month ago, by the way, approx. first week of March.
Exactly as I said in my post above.
Now why GM seems to have its head up its, er, somewhere dark regarding this seemingly obvious no-brainer idea of sending trainload after trainload of Volts on the Hamtramck-to-California express, that I cannot answer!
Maybe the other Chevy dealers in other parts of the country that can’t sell theirs locally can sell them to their CA counterparts (allowing the CA dealers to get the rebate?).
No, they can’t. In order to qualify for the California carpool lane, the car must be built with this particular emissions package (cannot be retrofitted), and they were built February 6 onwards. So you can export a Volt OUT of California, but nobody would want to import one INTO California.
Ampera sold over 400 units this past month in the Netherlands. Tiny market, one of the first months (if not the first) of availability, and they’re selling 1/5 of what is being sold in the US. European sales of this vehicle may indeed outpace American sales once inventory is properly stocked on both sides of the pond.
Do you have a reference link for this statistic?
http://bestsellingcarsblog.com/2012/04/06/netherlands-march-2012-vw-up-in-top-10-for-first-time-in-the-world/
“The Volt now has a 61 day supply,”
Which explains the early resumption of production. As long as I’ve been around and listening to sales reports on Detroit radio, a two month supply, 60 days, is considered “normal”. It means that there are enough cars in the pipeline to meet demand but not so many that inventory is a problem.
Who knows what gas prices will be, but as long as gas is above $3.50/gal I can see Chevy selling 35,000-45,000 Volts a year. Though not a 1964 1/2 Mustang level success, that would also not be an Edsel level failure. First year sales for the Edsel were 1/3 of expectations. GM sold about 7,500 Volts in 2011, and hoped to sell 10,000.
Maybe some of the corporate orders finally came through. GE claimed they were going to buy some and so did GSA plus a few other Obama-friendly companies. It remains to be seen if they really will buy Volts for their fleets.
I hope that GM keeps making the Volt for all those people who want to buy one. But the Volt should not be subsidized at taxpayer expense since GM was already bailed out and nationalized.
Until the masses can afford to buy a Volt it will remain a toy for the well-to-do.
@highesertcat- Do you object to the incentives that Toyota has been and is receiving for alternative powertrain vehicles? How about Ford, Nissan and the others?
It is public policy to promote these alternatives, which do not present a strong business case to manufacturers. As a society, how should these alternatives be encouraged? Should we eliminate CAFE and CO2 emissions regulations?
Yes I do!
Regardless of brand, regardless of country of origin, regardless of who owns the company, I do not support these ‘incentives’.
The product has to make it on its own merits, or fail on its own merits. Such was the case with the EV1. It failed on its own merits.
The Prius OTOH has made it on its own merits. I doubt if the Volt will ever catch on although the Prius just keeps expanding its line-up.
Alternate sources of energy will develop in due time when there is a profit to be made from them. Industry will determine when these alternate sources of energy will be profitable for them and will get behind them on their own if there is money to be made.
That won’t happen any time soon even with the greenweenies advocating that the taxpayers should fund development now. As long as oil is available all these other sources for generating energy are not going to fly. And we won’t run out of oil for hundreds of years yet.
Doctor Olds: We (or at least I) reject all forms of government intervention in the economy, period. There should be no subsidies and no taxes and no regulations. PERIOD. All government property should be auctioned off on eBay or equivalent. There should be no CAFE, no Solyndra, no nothing. That said, I am the proud owner of a Chevrolet Volt for the simple reason that it is a GREAT car. It competes with the finest, most silent, smooth and vibration-free cars on the market, and yes my other car is a Rolls Royce. GM made a big mistake launching the Volt as a Chevrolet instead of a Cadillac. The Volt is not some species of electrified Cruze. It is a premium performance car that happens to be the best the market has to offer today.
@PaloAltoWorldView- I share your view.
After a 40 year career with GM, including being part of Oldsmobile for the last 35 years of its 107 year life, I am painfully aware of the impact of government intervention on the industry.
I will stand on this point: if government wants to intervene, to force ZEVs, CAFE alternative technologies at odds with customer demand, they should also help defray the startup costs.
I would have preferred it if we at Oldsmobile could have continued to build the best selling carlines in the industry rather than spending the billions necessary to redesign the fleet for bureaucrats rather than paying customers.
As gas prices shot up to over $1.38 a liter this week (that’s $5.52 a U.S. gallon, BTW), it could be that GM is in the right place at the right time. Their inventory kinks worked out, first PR torpedo behind them, the European version well underway, GM might benefit if gas prices soar much higher.
Politics and ideology aside, I will always admire GM for its sheer tenacity. They could have been ‘me-too’ like Ford and the rest, merely licensing Toyota’s technology, or they could have gone in a different direction, which like all new directions in business, is always a risk.
I understand that by printing every miniscule piece of news about the Volt, good or bad, TTAC is acknowledging the importance of the Volt to GM’s future, if not America’s, too. Or do you enjoy the prospects of becoming a branch plant to Asia Inc?
I do not understand why so many people desperately cling to the notion that government is bad. There are plenty of stupid laws on the books, to be sure. There are plenty of things that the government could be doing, rather than what they are doing. However, the world that was contemplated by framers of your Constitution 250 years ago could not anticipate the world in which we live today. Everything from Enron to the Wall-Street implosion 4 years ago clearly indicates that Capitalism cannot be left to its own devices. The usual suspect rail against Government Motors, without making a peep about the subsidies and outright cash that Toyota and the gang have gotten from their government in the past 50 years. Like it or not, if you want to play in this game, you gotta pay. Don’t like it? Tell Washington to make Tokyo, Seoul and the rest stop. Stop your States from giving away the farm every time an Asian company comes sniffing around their backyard.
With the exception of the oil producing fiefdoms, the United States is the only place left on the planet where oil is still cheap. The party is over.
What plane of existence are you all operating from? Nearly half your oil is imported. Tax the crap out of it, like the rest of the world, use half the proceeds to pay down your debt (for Gawd’s Sake!) and the other half to SUBSIDIZE more technologies like the Volt in the hope of finding ways to get off sending half your paycheck to countries that hate you.
The North Sea is nearly dry. Europe is going to be looking for more oil. Canada is looking at calling the American tree-hugger’s bluff and sell its oil to China. I would feel a lot better having a Leaf or Volt in my driveway, knowing that if gasoline hits $1.70 a liter this summer, I would not give a damn.
(BTW, before anyone tromps down THAT tired road again, Ontario gets 70% of its electricity from either hydro or nuclear.) Should I figure out a way to get a 150′ extension cord off my balcony without the management seeing, I will be able to recharge my Volt or Leaf at night when the gas and coal fired plants in Ontario are shut down.
Nobody laments the demise of big fins and the rumble of a 440 cu in engine more than me. It’s time to find alternatives before the future passes us by.
+1
“GM might benefit if gas prices soar much higher.”
And that, gents, is why our government is doing everything they can to raise gasoline prices while feigning ignorance.
Of course diesel fuel climbs too and that makes goods more expensive but they aren’t concerned about that.