GM losing less on Volt than reported

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GM last month sold a record 2831 Volts, beating the prior record of 2289 cars in March.
Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
12 Sep 2012
1 min read

Incorrect calculations by journalists are responsible for rumours that General Motors was losing almost $50,000 for each Volt sold, says former GM executive Bob Lutz.

Firing back at the reports within a Reuters article, Lutz called the loss estimate as "preposterous''. He should know. Lutz was the guy who led the electric Volt's program.

The range-extender electric sedan is due here in November as the Holden Volt. Lutz, answering Reuters reports in his column in Forbes magazine, says costs were "very roughly'' equal to the price of the car - that is, $US37,000.

He says that Reuters only used figures based on the number of cars sold to date - not amortising the figures over the expected life of the model.

GM last month sold a record 2831 Volts, beating the prior record of 2289 cars in March. In the year to date, GM has sold 13,497 Volts, more than four times the sales of the same period in 2011. Holden will start selling the Volt in November for about $60,000.

Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
GoAutoMedia Cars have been the corner stone to Neil’s passion, beginning at pre-school age, through school but then pushed sideways while he studied accounting. It was rekindled when he started contributing to magazines including Bushdriver and then when he started a motoring section in Perth’s The Western Mail. He was then appointed as a finance writer for the evening Daily News, supplemented by writing its motoring column. He moved to The Sunday Times as finance editor and after a nine-year term, finally drove back into motoring when in 1998 he was asked to rebrand and restyle the newspaper’s motoring section, expanding it over 12 years from a two-page section to a 36-page lift-out. In 2010 he was selected to join News Ltd’s national motoring group Carsguide and covered national and international events, launches, news conferences and Car of the Year awards until November 2014 when he moved into freelancing, working for GoAuto, The West Australian, Western 4WDriver magazine, Bauer Media and as an online content writer for one of Australia’s biggest car groups. He has involved himself in all aspects including motorsport where he has competed in everything from motocross to motorkhanas and rallies including Targa West and the ARC Forest Rally. He loves all facets of the car industry, from design, manufacture, testing, marketing and even business structures and believes cars are one of the few high-volume consumables to combine a very high degree of engineering enlivened with an even higher degree of emotion from its consumers.
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