A report released earlier today shows how some Chevy dealerships are turning down shipments of the Chevy Volt due to concerns with fire hazards and their lackluster sales. This certainly doesn't help with the Volt's underperforming 2011 sales figures, which was 7,671, and their 2012 target?: 60,000. The message out of the White House has been touting that General Motors (GM) is now the largest automaker in the world, but what they failed to mention is that it's because of the Japanese tsunami that occurred last March, which crippled Toyota and other Asian automakers. We're now seeing that dealerships are turning down Volt shipments, not only because there isn't a demand, but because of safety concerns.
GM's success is completely separate from the Volt and even the United States. Their growth has largely taken place overseas. They are still deep in the red and owe taxpayers billions of dollars, but that money will never get fully repaid. The bailout of GM - and Chrysler for that matter - was intended to benefit Obama's union thugs. It was payback for their support of him during the election. The entire process has been a sham, one where GM should have followed the standard procedure and entered bankruptcy. They would have emerged a stronger company without government control.
The Chevy Volt is a great engineering feat, it's just that the market doesn't want it. GM has a target of selling 60,000 Volts in 2012. That simply won't happen; there isn't enough demand. GM claims they're not going to chase this target, which is an admittance of failure. The environmental whackos fail to realize that oil will not go away overnight.
From Automotive News:
In Clovis, Calif., meanwhile, Brett Hedrick, dealer principal at Hedrick's Chevrolet, sold 10 Volts last year. But in December and January he turned down all six Volts allocated to him under GM's "turn-and-earn" system, which distributes vehicles based on past sales volumes and inventory levels.
GM's "thinking we need six more Volts is just crazy," Hedrick says. "We've never sold more than two in a month." Hedrick says he usually takes just about every vehicle that GM allocates to him.
GM spokesman Rob Peterson confirmed that "dealer ordering is down" for the Volt. He said many dealers have been waiting for resolution of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's investigation into the risk of fires in the car's battery pack. Last year three packs caught fire in the days or weeks following government test crashes.
This month GM announced a voluntary repair aimed at protecting the battery pack. And last week NHTSA said it has closed its investigation, concluding that the battery pack poses no significant fire risk.
"There's a lot of misinformation that has swirled over the past month," Peterson said. "Dealers are kind of waiting for things to settle down."
Hedrick and other dealers say that their GM zone reps aren't pressuring them to take more Volts. "They haven't jammed us," he says. "I think they'll just give them to somebody else."
Industry insiders are closely watching sales of the Volt and Nissan Leaf as barometers of market demand for electric vehicles. Several other automakers are set to launch EVs this year.
At the Detroit auto show this month, GM executives said they wouldn't chase a previous Volt production target set for 2012 -- 60,000 units, three-quarters of which would be for U.S. sales -- and vowed simply to build as many as customers want.
GM sold 7,671 Volts in the United States in 2011, short of its 10,000-unit target. It launched the car in seven key markets starting in late 2010, but didn't begin a national rollout until this past autumn.
"We haven't satisfied demand," GM North America President Mark Reuss said on the sidelines of the Detroit show. He said GM will be able to gauge Volt demand by sometime in the second quarter.
Many dealers say they no longer have customers waiting in the wings.
One East Coast Chevy dealer said he agreed to take all five of the Volts that GM allocated to him this month, even though he has seen a "huge dropoff" in customer interest.
The Volt is a product of the radical green energy movement. It's the Solyndra of automobiles. Liberals likely think that enough wasn't done to promote the Volt, rather than admitting it's a failure, or even a product that's premature for its time. For liberals, something is never enough, and when that something fails, they believe that more resources will make it successful. In this case, GM is failing to realize that even the government can't dictate consumer demand. Although that's what liberals want, it's fortunately not a reality yet.
Darrell Lect is a contributing editor for Habledash.
