GM’s continuing evolution of the pedestrian alert system, first deployed in 2011, now using front and rear speakers to provide audible alerts when operating at slow speeds.There is still no DC fast charging option for the Volt. The move, which matches the charging rate of Chevy’s Bolt on Level 2, will give the Volt a full 53 mile EV charge in 2.3 hours according to Chevy. Headlining the new feature set is an improved 240V charging system that will up the rate of charge from 3.6kW to 7.2kW or 16A to 32A. “We need to engage every stakeholder in the next two to three months to prepare for any decisions.GM today announced a somewhat minor upgrade to the 2019 Chevy Volt PHEV that will be available this fall. “Two to three months I think we need, for sure, before we can speak more precisely on further details,” Stracke said. The Detroit-based automaker’s plan until November was to break even in Europe. Karl-Friedrich Stracke, head of GM Europe and chief executive officer of Opel, told reporters at the Geneva motor show that the automaker sees “high urgency” to fix its operations in the region, which lost $747 million last year before interest and taxes. General Motors Co., the world’s largest automaker, said it will take two to three months to announce a restructuring plan for its money-losing European operations. Shortly after its announcement about the Volt, GM said it will reveal a new plan to boost its Europe division. As auto blogger Jonathan Welsh writes, “Even if you never used gasoline in the Volt, you’d wait about 12 years before you saved enough on gas to make up for the Volt’s price premium.” (The Volt has a gas engine that kicks in when the battery runs out.) The car gets about 94 miles per gallon, according to the EPA, but it starts at $39,195, and only upper-income buyers with a big tax bill can qualify for the $7,500 federal tax credit. But neither the pre-panic nor post-panic numbers were anywhere near the rate needed to meet GM’s goal of 45,000 Volt deliveries this year.Ī more likely explanation is that the Volt is just far too expensive for many customers. After all, Volt sales rebounded in February to 1,023 vehicles sold, and it looks like the fire scare is slowly subsiding. Add that up, and GM sold only 603 Volts in January, down from 1,520 in December.īut the scare over batteries is only a partial explanation. Conservatives started denouncing the company (Rush Limbaugh called GM “a corporation that’s trying to kill its customers”). On the merits, the fires weren’t a huge concern - the Volts only caught fire days or weeks after extreme lab testing, and according to a government investigationthey’re no more likely to catch fire than gas-powered automobiles. GM executives have said the recent frenzy over a Volt battery fire in crash tests has hurt sales. Why has the Volt failed to catch on? Brad Plumer writes: “We’re doing it to maintain our proper inventory levels as we align production with demand,” he said. GM spokesman Chris Lee said the company was “taking a temporary shutdown” of the assembly line. “The fact that GM is now facing an oversupply of Volts suggests that consumer demand is just not that strong for these vehicles,” said Lacey Plache, chief economist for auto information site. It sold 1,023 Volts in February and 603 in January. The company stopped publicly announcing sales targets last year. GM sold 7,671 Volts last year, below its original goal of 10,000 cars.
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