Chevrolet, member of Government General Motors, have once again gotten in hot water over their star environmental vehicle, the Volt.
Reuters recently published an article containing a cost calculation on the Chevy Volt done by Automotive Consulting Group.
Not the costs of buying one, running one or insuring one, but what it costs Chevrolet to make one of these range extended EVs.
Having crunched several numbers, the analysts came up with a figure of around 89.000 USD. Obviously, that’s considerably more than the car retails for.
Even with the Government rebate considered, the customers feel the price is pretty large. Considering that GM is supposed to lose nearly 50k on each one they make, that seems more agreeable.
After all the crunch the Chevrolet Volt article got at Reuters, GM’s very own Bob Lutz decided to clear the waters on the matter.
At least, that’s what he tried to do. What he said is actually quite simple. He simply said that the figures aren’t accurate.
Going halfway on the effort, Lutz, didn’t really say how much it actually costs the company to build a Volt. He did say that the company is “very close” to evening out the cash flow on the car.
Provided they’d manage to sell more Volts, over a longer period of time, the project would actually end up making money.
That seems like a reasonable thing to say, after all, the Volt is crammed full of new technology that comes with some serious development costs.
It would have been nice to know exactly what the costs were.
