Chevy Volt Meets High Resistance, GM Suspends Sales

Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill reports that GM has announced to employees at one of its facilities that it is suspending production of the Chevy Volt for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees. Back when GM launched the beleaguered electric car, it boldly targeted sales of 10,000 in 2011 and 60,000 in 2012 but GM only sold 7,671 Volts in 2011 and just 1,626 so far this year. 'We needed to maintain proper inventory and make sure that we continued to meet market demand,' says GM spokesman Chris Lee. 'We see positive trends, but we needed to make this market adjustment.' Although President Obama promised he would buy a Volt 'five years from now, when I'm not president anymore,' the Volt has come under criticism from Republicans in Congress because of reports of its batteries catching on fire during testing. Ironically, the shutdown comes as gas prices are soaring, exactly the time when an electric car should be an easy sell." If it's still true that GM was taking a loss on every Volt sold, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.

Comments

Japan and Europe is where the industry is

[AgentSmitz]

From what I've seen, I'd just say that American car models are a thing of the past. Asian countries have largely taken that position, while European countries like Italy maintain the status of luxury car models. There's just no market for American cars. I am European myself and I've never heard any reason of having an US made car. A lot of people wanted Japanese cars, especially Subaru .. Then there's Ferrari and european luxul models. What does US have?

Thank you,
Agent Smitz

Re:Japan and Europe is where the industry is

[longbot]

As a former Ford owner, they are assembled in the US of Canadian and Mexican parts, and all of the engineering is done by Volvo's engineers now (which is a good thing, Ford never was good at making things that didn't fall apart).

I switched to European cars (first a Volvo, and then an old Mercedes). American cars are disposable at 10yrs or 100k miles or less. I'll never buy one again.