General Motors has revealed that they are to halt production of the Chevrolet Volt for four weeks as sales stay low.
At that time – with a production target of 45,000 Chevy Volts in 2012 – GM had managed to flog just 1.626 Volts in the first two months of 2012 so they decided to halt production for a moth as they had 6,300 Volts stockpiled.
Sales seem to have been slightly better since production restarted, and GM have now managed to get rid of 10,666 Volts up to the end of July, but that’s nowhere near what the projections say it should have been (26,250 according to GM’s revised projection, and 35,000 according to the original predictions).
That means GM are still building far more cars than they can flog, so they’ve decided to shut production down for a further month to let sales catch up a bit with production.
There is no doubt the Chevy Volt is a good car – and the range-extender route is the most sensible way to build an EV – but with prices so high compared to an equivalent ICE car (you can get a Ford Focus for $18k in the States – the Volt costs $41k) how on earth do GM – or any other car maker – expect to make significant sales of alternatively fuelled cars?
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