8,000 to 60,000 Volts per year
Are you feeling lucky?Today, as expected, GM announced its investment of $336 million to upgrade its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant for production of the Chevy Volt, bringing GM's total Volt investment to $700 million.
While greats news for Volt fans, you'll have to be pretty lucky if you want to buy a Volt when it goes on sale in late 2010. According to the DetroitNews, GM will produce 8,000 Volts in 2011 and eventually increase production to as many as 60,000 Volts per year.
posted by Dahcredyns at
10:46 AM
3 Comments:
Great write up! Check out my review and pix from this year's LA Auto Show here: http://benhelms.com/laautoshow/
Hey, even if I'm unlucky all that means is that I get to keep my money another 6 - 12 months. Ha!
And if I'm really unlucky, I'll be forced to buy the much improved, and cheaper Volt Gen II. Double Ha!!
Personally, I don't mind waiting years to buy a piece of the future. I am the biggest Apple fanatic, but waited 2 years to buy an iPhone. I only bought once the 3rd generation came out with double the RAM and the next gen ARM CPU.
GM is smart to do a low volume Volt Gen I. The smaller the supply chain commitment for Volt Gen I, the faster GM can move to a Volt Gen II supply chain. GM would then be able to make place much bigger orders with their suppliers with much less risk. At that point Volt Gen II will achieve economies of scale that it would have been IRRESPONSIBLE to attempt with the Volt Gen I parts.
Maybe the race GM needs to win is not to be the first to produce a PHEV, but to be the first to commit to economies of scale in a PHEV supply chain.
PS The way I see it, if GM had made a large supply chain commitment to the Volt Gen 1 suppliers, GM would have had to keep the Volt Gen 1 design around longer to meet that commitment. Normally that's how you achieve economies of scale, but GM doesn't want economies of scale with their initial Volt design/parts. At this point they value flexibility to iterate their design and technology over economies of scale, IMHO.
This goes back to GM vs Toyota. Toyota is being very deliberate, and is making almost no supplier commitments as they iterate their PHEV designs in fleet programs. GM is making more of a commitment, you could say gamble, by iterating not just their design with production vehicles, but also starting the clock on their supply chain iterations.
Of course, Toyota already has a finely tuned hybrid supply chain that is probably capable of transforming into a PHEV supply chain on short notice.
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