“So it seemed like a good thing in August when sales of the $40,000 car set a monthly record of 2,800.”
“It costs $60,000 to $75,000 to build a Volt,”
Posted: 9:20 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, 2012
GM offers big discounts to boost Volt sales
By TOM KRISHER
The Associated Press
DETROIT —
General Motors rolled out the Chevrolet Volt two years ago with lofty sales goals and the promise of a new technology that someday would help end America’s dependence on oil.
So it seemed like a good thing in August when sales of the $40,000 car set a monthly record of 2,800. But a closer look shows that things aren’t what they seem for the cutting-edge car.
Sales rose mostly because of discounts of almost $10,000, or 25 percent of the Volt’s sticker price, according to figures from TrueCar.com, an auto pricing website. Other pricing services gave similar numbers, and dealers confirmed that steeply discounted Volts are selling better than a few months ago.
GM’s discounts on the Volt are more than four times the industry’s per-vehicle average, according to TrueCar estimates. Edmunds.com and J.D. Power and Associates say they’re about three times the average. Discounts include low-interest financing, cash discounts to buyers, sales bonuses to dealers, and subsidized leases.
GM executives have conceded from the start that they were losing money on the Volt, and that was before the big discounts.
Now the losses could be even higher. It costs $60,000 to $75,000 to build a Volt, including development, manufacturing and raw materials, estimates Sandy Munro, president of Munro & Associates, a Troy, Mich., a company that analyzes vehicle production expenses for automakers. Much of the cost comes from an expensive combination of two power systems — electric and gasoline. With a sticker price of $40,000, minus the $10,000 the company pays in incentives, GM gets roughly $30,000 for every Volt. So it could be losing at least $30,000 per car.
“It certainly wasn’t a rousing success,” Carter Driscoll, senior analyst for CapStone Investments who follows electric cars, says of the Volt.
GM confirmed there are incentives on the Volt and that the company loses money on the car. But the automaker declined to give figures for the discounts or the losses. The figures exclude a federal tax credit that goes to buyers.
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