Fiat Chrysler CEO: Please Don't Buy Our Electric Car

schwit1 (797399) writes "The CEO of Fiat Chrysler said he hopes that people don't buy his company's electric car, the Fiat 500e, which he is forced to sell at a loss because of state and federal mandates. 'I hope you don't buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000,' Sergio Marchionne told the audience at the Brookings Institute during a discussion of the auto bailout. 'I'm honest enough to tell you that I will make the car, I'll make it available which is my requirement but I will sell the limit of what I need to sell and not one more,' said Marchionne. Fiat Chrysler produces two Fiat 500s. The gas-powered Fiat 500 has a base price of $17,300. The electric Fiat 500e runs $32,650. In his candid remarks, Marchionne blamed regulations set in place in California and by President Obama." (Also at USA Today.) If they find they're selling too many for comfort, couldn't they raise the price?

Comments

Raise the Price

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they can't. CA Regulations don't allow electric alternatives to be n% more than gas.

Re:Raise the Price

[erice]

No, they can't. CA Regulations don't allow electric alternatives to be n% more than gas.

Citation needed. I looked through the regulation and I see no mention of requiring a certain price for ZEV's.

What it does require is that a certain % of the sales be of ZEV's. If they are change too much, they won't sell enough. This leads to two solutions:

1) Spend little on R&D for an electric vehicle. Sell it just cheap enough (at a loss if you have to) to meet the minimum requirement. Whine about it.
2) Put some effort and investment in developing an electric car that people will actually want with a manufacturing cost that leads to a price people are willing to pay. Refine the design over time so that it becomes that profit center that saves your bacon when the bottom inevitably drops out of the IC car market as the cost of gas heads toward the stratosphere.

Re:Raise the Price

[The Grim Reefer]

How is he short sighted? The Republicans have fuck him and his company. They want to put him and all of his employees out on the streets. To their kind, autoworkers are scum that need to starve. That is their world. That is why they are doing this to him. They are forcing him at gunpoint to sell cars at a loss until they go out of business.

Are you saying that the oil and coal burning/global warming denying republicans are forcing Chrysler to sell electric cars (at a loss) "at gunpoint"? And they're going to hurt the oil and coal industries so they can add the autoworkers to the unemployed?

Marchionne blamed regulations set in place in California and by President Obama.

I must have missed when the president switched parties. Obama the Republican. Who knew.

Re:Raise the Price

[amxcoder]

This is the funniest comment I've heard. While I'll admit, most republicans and conservatives alike (yes, there is a difference), don't like some of the tactics and fundamentals of unions, your comment is highly ironic. I don't think the republicans WANT to force the company out of business, I think most conservative groups and libertarians were agains the auto bail-out in general. Mostly because it goes against free market principles, and also rewarded specific companies for mismanaging the company into bankruptcy. This is true of the auto companies that were bailed out, as well as the banks that were bailed out. The UAW took a big hit, because a big chunk of the bailout went to make sure the Union still got it's demands met, for hourly wages and retirement perks, all from a dying company. If any other company was about to founder, the last thing most employees would get would be raises and more pay. I certainly didn't when I worked for a company that was going under, they told us the truth, they were hurting, they enacted unpaid furlough days, and froze all pay increases as a step in trying to save the company from going under. While us workers didn't like this necessarily, it was better than all of us get let go when the company goes under.

The part of your comment about forcing them at gunpoint to sell cars at a loss is the ironic part of your statement. Just WHO do you think is the party and groups that are pushing the hardest for electric car sales? Who is pushing the hardest for higher, hard to meet CAFE standards for gas mileage, and who is behind the electric car subsidies to try to entice the general public to purchase these overpriced, under-performing, cars? Here is a hint... it's not conservatives.

Re:Raise the Price

[Rei]

I can guarantee you that he's not "exhausting every resource he can muster" because there's really just one figure that matters most, and that's volume.

Most people think EV prices are all about the batteries, but that's just not true. Even the drivetrains are really expensive. *Everything* is really expensive because they're made in small volumes. The Volt's drivetrain, for example, reportedly costs about $6k per vehicle. Why? It's a heck of a lot simpler than a gasoline drivetrain, with a tenth as many moving parts and less raw materials costs. But they're just not mass produced. Here's my favorite line of EV motors, the EMRAX series. They're the size of a desk fan yet have up to 160kW peak power (215hp); they're designed for electric airplanes, and can be inline chained together for even more power. Simple, tiny, no exotic raw materials... but they cost something like $4k each, plus something like $3k for the inverter/controller. Why? Because they're all wired by hand. Even the magnets are hand-wound. With enough volume, you could open a Chinese factory to pump out something like that for maybe $500 dollars a pop. But that's just not the situation today.

The same thing applies to batteries, which is why Tesla's gigafactory is such a big deal. A lot of people seem to think, "But hey, batteries are already mass-produced!". But really, those are the wrong kind of batteries, batteries designed for small electronics, not the type of large EV batteries you can get serious economies of scale on rather than wasting your effort stamping out tens of millions of tiny casings and the like, then wiring ten thousand little cells together and trying to ensure no cell failures. Also the batteries that best suit EVs are cobalt-free, while the potential for price reduction on your typical small electronics li-ion batteries is limited by cobalt prices; the raw materials on most EV batteries are far cheaper, it's always been manufacturing costs that have held them back. Something like the gigafactory has the potential to dramatically slash EV pack prices per kilowatt hour.

Basically, in pretty much aspect, if you want EVs to be cheap, you need to go big. Just like it is for gasoline cars, the key to affordability is scale. If your team responsible for a gasoline car engineers every part from the ground up and produces them in small volumes like some supercar makers do, it'll cost an arm and a leg and your firstborn as well.

To go big, you need a combination of an interested, motivated public and a good sales campaign. Once people start driving EVs, as a general rule, they love them and never want to switch back, but it's hard getting them to start, especially because of "range anxiety" concerns. So things like including with a purchase or lease X number of free 24-hour gasoline car rentals, or installing widespread fast charters, or making available range-extending self-steering genset trailers, or things of that nature is important to making people comfortable enough to take the plunge the first time. And of course subsidies can help a great deal while you're trying to establish the market.

He'll have his work cut out for him

[Steffan]

It's a fantastic car. I've had mine for about nine months and after having owned an number of rather expensive (and inexpensive) cars, this is probably my favorite.

I've never driven a gas-powered Fiat 500, but I imagine the build quality is similar. It's surprisingly comfortable and well built for a car in its price range. I'm pretty particular about the noise levels in my cars and the electric model is reported to have more sound dampening than the standard model; external noise is probably more obvious when there's no engine to mask it. Quiet, fantastic acceleration, and virtually no maintenance. There's a lot to like about this car.

I hope they continue selling them. I've leased mine since the technology changes quickly enough that I expect better range / faster charging, or both within 3-4 years (plus competition from Tesla in that market segment), but if there were no other option I would definitely purchase mine at the end of the lease.

This is my first electric car, but I can say unequivocally that I will never purchase another gas-powered car (unless it's an exotic / sports car). It really is that much of an improvement over internal combustion.*

*For me. Obviously electric cars are not for _everyone_(yet). If you need to haul bales of hay up a mountainside four times a week, buy a truck.

Maybe he should build a better car.

[dbc]

I just dropped my daughter off at the gym. In a 15 minute round-trip drive, I counted 5 Leafs. Nissan isn't trying to stop people from buying their car. Neither is Tesla.