Chevy Volt for $41,000 or $350/month to lease
Cheaper to lease than to own.
Is leasing the future of the auto industry?
The new Chevy Volt will be offered at $41,000, although the new plug-in vehicle will also qualify for a $7500 tax credit. A loaded Volt, with leather seats and a rear view camera, will cost $44,600.
However, the Volt will also be available for lease, starting at $350 per month – much cheaper than financing a Volt purchase – thanks to the $7500 tax credit that GM can use to lower the payments on a three year lease, although a $2,500 down payment is also required.
Additionally, GM hopes to quell any concerns regarding reliability, particularly concerning the costly battery pack with its enticing lease offering. Moreover, GM believes that it will be able to reuse the battery packs in leased Volts to also help recover some costs.
So, if plug-ins are the future, is leasing to become the primary business model of the auto industry?
Once tax credits expire on the Volt, GM’s Volt leases won’t be nearly as sweet. Nonetheless, the re-usability of the battery packs might enable GM to keep leases a little lower than ownership, and keeping Volt prices as low as possible seems critical to any success. Nevertheless, without tax credits, it seems much higher Volt lease payments are inevitable.
What do you think? Is the Volt priced correctly? Is the lease deal a good move, or should the tax credits only be available to buyers?
Very early on, however, such as at the original debut of the Volt, GM was hoping to bring in the cost of the car at under $30,000. Of course, back then, the Volt concept hadn’t yet been totally conceptualized.
Ultimately, the Volt seems to me a nice chip in the plug-in game and a great marketing tool, but still more of a concept that needs serious refinement in order to become a top selling vehicle or technology.
And in terms of battery costs, mother nature, the battery costs have to come down significantly, especially once the tax credits expire. According to the battery experts and analysts, costs will still remain far too high without a technological breakthrough in lithium technology. Even then, such a breakthrough could take decades to make its way into cost-effective plug-ins without something like dynamic charging for instance.
The Volt is the first of its kind! I’m sure price will go down in a few years, they will follow the prices of batteries.
The Volt is $10k cheaper than a Tahoe hybrid that you can’t plug. It’s not a bad deal.
I doubt is GM have any real marketing plan to compete in auto market with is model “Chevy Volt” which priced at almost $41,000, I can’t see any future for this model “without tax credits”, leasing option is quite good but we can comment after knowing more about that
Well.. it’s pretty clear that GM has no real plans for this car …. it’s clearly a throw-away…..
I don’t know what comes after it…
but this one is going to be a museum piece in a couple of years.
There may have been a lot of dreamers out there hoping for a lower price, but in the end GM came in right at the price range they said they would when they first annnounced the Volt.
I predicted 40-45K.
Still…. $41,000 is still pretty high for any vehicle with a Chevy logo. That price is usually reserved for Cadillacs.
Hopefully in time GM will find ways to significantly reduce this cost.
That integrated “solar skin” can’t be that far off!
That Israeli plan sounds a lot like Better Place which even envisions super cheap cars, almost like modular, upgradable skins that buy/lease energy – battery included – much like how cell phone consumers buy minutes. New business models for the auto industry seem inevitable.
Still, like you, I’d rather own my plug-in, which I will, eventually. Of course, my plug-in will simply be converting my hybrid into a plug-in.
For as few as will be available, I don’t think a lease-only setup hurts the Volt. In fact, in urban areas, that might make things a lot simpler. At some point I saw a plan from Israel that insisted on battery changing stations in which you’d have a separate lease or membership for swapping battery packs (at stations that could do it as fast as a gas fill-up is now).
As a potential “off-the-grid” candidate though, owning it out-right and using my own electricity generation would be the only way to go with an all electric vehicle. Then again, I’d need a vehicle with integrated solar panels/skin, perhaps bundled with a windmill kit for home
So, my Volt price prediction yesterday was way off. I thought for sure no higher than $35,000, although I didn’t factor the lease option, which is really the buzz I was looking for in my price prediction.
Still, what happens after the tax credits expire? According to what I’ve read, that could add $200 per month to the lease payment.
Even worse, there are many analysts that have stated that even at $40,000, GM might be even be able to recover vehicle costs, let alone any of the production costs, which are quite high – more than a billion at last count I believe.
Can marketing and the green halo effect alone make up that difference?