{"id":386,"date":"2012-09-12T21:22:23","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T04:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/12\/gm-losing-money-on-the-volt\/"},"modified":"2012-10-08T10:30:39","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T17:30:39","slug":"gm-losing-money-on-the-volt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/12\/gm-losing-money-on-the-volt\/","title":{"rendered":"GM Losing Money on the Volt?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was an article yesterday from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2012\/09\/10\/us-generalmotors-autos-volt-idUSBRE88904J20120910\">Reuters<\/a> saying that GM is losing up to $49,000 on each Volt that they sell, and that it costs about $89,000 to produce one.<\/p>\n<p>You have to read the article carefully to realize that they are including the development cost, over a billion dollars, in the price by dividing one billion dollars by the number of Volts that have sold.  By this logic, if I invest $500,000 and open a new McDonalds I will be losing thousands of dollars on every hamburger I sell, at least for the first few days, weeks, months and more.<\/p>\n<p>Bob Lutz was head of GM when the Volt was conceived and brought to production &#8212; he&#8217;s the &#8220;Father of the Volt&#8221;.  He had a pointed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/boblutz\/2012\/09\/10\/the-real-story-on-gms-volt-costs\/\">response <\/a>to the Reuters article.  Among other things, he called their statements &#8220;preposterous&#8221;.  He claims that the Volt is near or slightly better than break-even based on production costs, and that things will improve a lot with future generations and new vehicles taking advantage of the technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was an article yesterday from Reuters saying that GM is losing up to $49,000 on each Volt that they sell, and that it costs about $89,000 to produce one. You have to read the article carefully to realize that they are including the development cost, over a billion dollars, in the price by dividing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}