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Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

Given that G.M. destroyed their first electric car of this decade why would anyone trust them to build a new one but somehow better the second time around? I've never heard of a company purposefully destroying capital in the way G.M. did. This has to be collectively the stupidest corporation in America right now.

The Volt will likely fail because of its massive price and less than optimal features. Why would you buy one over a Prius anyway? At least with the Prius you'd be getting a quality car made by a quality company. I have no idea why people are buying cars made by G.M. these days between the poor quality history and getting bailed out I have no interest in doing business with them.

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How can you say that they are the stupidest? They pulled off a massive tax-payer bailout, screwed their investors, stayed out of jail and are lining up a new round of investors. They may not be the best at making cars, but the company's mastery of the American financial and political process is second to none.

And unfortunately the taxpayers are the ones that are paying due to this mastery.

I do not understand why everyone is getting hyped up about this. What is the purpose of the electric car? The low/no emissions or the high MPG? If you ask people you will find out that almost all of them will say the MPG since that is the reason that has a monetary impact.

I recall when I was in England I had a Renault Clio Diesel with 1.5 liter engine. That car would give me 66 mpg on the highway and around 50-55 mpg in the city. That was back in 2003 and it cost brand new 9,000 GBP (less than $15,000). That car was small, comfortable and fun to drive. It did what it was supposed to and more.

Why do we see then a $41,000 price tag on a vehicle that cannot give us 66 mpg and that will be subsidized by the government (i.e. we will all pay for every car sold whether we like it or not).

Great!

To be fair, American taxpayers have been subsidizing the Toyota Prius for years too. Why the Volt costs so much is beyond me - the technologies should be reasonably mature by now. But GM has to head in this direction. They can't just build shitty SUVs and crossovers.

Why is the totally electric Nissan Leaf only $32,780? Under ideal conditions it can get 130+ miles to a charge [1] implying it uses better and/or more batteries than the Volt.

The trim and finish must be much better on the Volt considering how expensive batteries are and how relatively cheap gasoline engines are. Or am I missing something here?

1: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20008319-48.html

The Volt website does seem to imply that it comes well speced. Navigation and 30gb music storage seem to be standard. By comparison a similar speced Camry hybrid is between 30-33k

It doesn't have the gasoline engine. First off, gasoline engines are not as cheap as you think they are in automobile configuration. There is a big difference between what you buy for a lawn mower and what they put in the Volt. Plus you have a lot more arrangement issues related to stuffing more crap into the same sized box. It takes a lot of man hours to design and build something like that.

You really managed to fit it all in there.

>Given that G.M. destroyed their first electric car of this decade why would anyone trust them to build a new one

Because they had the experience of building an electric car, knowing it wasn't viable, and going back to the drawing board until the technology was refined?

>I've never heard of a company purposefully destroying capital in the way G.M. did.

That's because your analysis of it is hipster, populist garbage. Sorry to be impolite about it, but the whole "who killed the electric car" movement is populated by people proud of their ignorance.

>The Volt will likely fail because of its massive price

Since when did $41K (really $33.5) get classed as a "massive price"? That is an absolutely typical mid-level sedan price, and apparently the volt is fairly well equipped.

>At least with the Prius you'd be getting a quality car made by a quality company.

The number of problems with the Prius have been legendary. Toyota's quality lead over GM has shrunk to almost a rounding error, yet we'll forever hear the "angry at GM guy" railing his 1980s argument.

I think the problem was that they didn't learn anything from that experience. It was undermined by internal political processes, and the party line for most of the 2000's was that GM was never going to build hybrid cars because the GM execs decided batteries didn't appeal to their egos.

It's got nothing to do with profitability, viability, maturity of technology, etc. I mean, GM built, marketed, and invested millions into some of the MOST unviable cars out there you can find. At one point, almost every single car they sold was at a loss - they were paying people to drive them off the lots. You can't get more "unviable" than that.

And I don't think the argument is "who killed the electric car" - the real story is "who killed GM" - the entire company is an exercise in producing a black hole for money, not in manufacturing or car making.

>It's got nothing to do with profitability, viability, maturity of technology, etc.

So had the rest of the industry moved to electric vehicles, eating GM's lunch? Surely they must have given that GM was in bed with big oil and was turning a blind eye to this great technology.

Of course they didn't. Honda and Toyota did some minor initiatives in marginally hybrid vehicles (which they sold at a loss primarily for image, while at the same time ramping up their own mega-SUV land yacht efforts). Everyone else just ignored it.

Worse the entire industry didn't even know what "future" was the best future. Hydrogen fuel? Electric? Flex fuels?

Was some sort of ultra-capacitor going to come and change the entire industry?

The improvements in battery technology over just the past couple of years have been incredible. Everything relies upon battery technology, and the entire worldwide automotive industry is essentially working together on this. GM in no way had it mastered over a decade ago.

>At one point, almost every single car they sold was at a loss - they were paying people to drive them off the lots.

Any year that any company has a loss you could claim that they "lost money on every single unit sold", but of course that would be facile. GM's trouble centered on a long accumulated pile of debt while they did a worldwide expansion, coupled with massive liabilities to the union in the US.

>>That's because your analysis of it is hipster, populist garbage. Sorry to be impolite about it, but the whole "who killed the electric car" movement is populated by people proud of their ignorance.

I don't understand what you mean here? They destroyed the engines? Why would you destroy your capital? It's their right I guess but that seems irrational.

>>Toyota's quality lead over GM has shrunk to almost a rounding error, yet we'll forever hear the "angry at GM guy" railing his 1980s argument.

Rounding error? Every car that my parents have owned from GM in the last 30 thirty years has cost them fortunes to maintain. My Corolla costs me virtually nothing to maintain after 10 years on the road and living on the streets of Boston.

I believe they took all the EV1's and shredded them. So yes, they did destroy the engines, the chassis, and the spare parts so no one could maintain them outside of GM even if they wanted to.

They also removed the engines from the cars in their showroom. Where's the logic in that move? Is someone going to break in and steal the car?

>Why would you destroy your capital?

They were trial products, and represented a significant liability to the corporation for no benefit. The automobile industry is pretty much the most litigious industry going, so eliminating what wasn't commercially viable was a very, very fiscally prudent move.

You'll have to explain that to me. What was the liability? Government regulation? Why was the trial considered a failure anyway?

I haven't read the contract, but what do you want to bet the paperwork people had to sign to get one of the EV1's excused GM from liability in the event the experimental car did something unexpected (say electrocution or a fire)?

The last thing GM would have wanted is a couple hundred of its test fleet to get in the hands of the public.

There was a known cost to destroying the failed product line and an unknown cost to support it going forward (not just liability but parts and service). They went down the fiscally sound path.

To give it some credibility, here's mazda doing something similar.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120942873506551291.html

Ancedotes != evidence.

From my experience the quality of a Ford beats that of a Japanese car in the show room. Maitenance is probably a wash. I have 0 experience with GM so I don't know, but I've owned a Ford for the last 10 years with >150k miles on it and have had very few issues. I also own a Subaru and it has had more issues and the quality is noticeably lower. My finance owns a Corolla from the same year as my Subaru with the same miles and it has had fewer issues, but still more than the Ford and the Ford is way older. I have some issues with it right now actually. Plus the Toyota totally sucks. 0 fun, crappy interior, tiny, horrific in the snow. We're never buying a Toyota ever again.

Is it a Ford car or truck?

"Since when did $41K (really $33.5) get classed as a "massive price"? That is an absolutely typical mid-level sedan price, and apparently the volt is fairly well equipped."

Since the economic crisis happened. I'm not even on my way to saving for my first car, and I'm already looking for cars under $10,000.

Most families that are not well off usually look for cars in the $20-30 grand range. So 41K is a lot - in today's terms.

>Since the economic crisis happened. I'm not even on my way to saving for my first car, and I'm already looking for cars under $10,000.

I'm not sure if the economic crisis has anything to do with that. I haven't seen any major slashing of prices. Quite the opposite, in fact: Incentives and deals have disappeared, and the net cost has increased.

>Most families that are not well off usually look for cars in the $20-30 grand range. So 41K is a lot - in today's terms.

I don't think it's intending to compete with standard family vehicles. This is a very low quantity run, targeted at the sort of (young professionals) people who would likely have bought a VW TDI or something, where the price range isn't all that different.

Isn't $41K right in line with what people were paying for Hummers? People didn't seem to think that was a "massive price", and Hummers were ridiculously impracticable and ridiculously expensive to own/run.

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