PC, you always like to crow about American exceptionalism. In reality, you are as anti-American as it gets. You folks on the right like to crow about the 'risk takers' Well PC meet a risk taker...General Motors.
And if you believe for a moment the governments of Japan, Korea and China don't pick winners and losers, you are naive. Those governments always pick their home manufacturers, and use strategies like huge subsidies to help their manufacturers capture markets and try to put American companies out of business. Japan's universal health care lowers the manufacturing costs of their car makers to around $200 per vehicle. American manufactures spend $1500 per vehicle on health care costs.
From your article...
Still, as the company wrestles with how to drive down costs and increase showroom traffic, Parks said the Volt is an important car for GM in other respects.
"It wasn't conceived as a way to make tons of money," he said. "It was a big dip in the technology pool for GM. We've learned a boatload of stuff that we're deploying on other models," Parks said. Those include the Cruze and such future cars as the 2014 Cadillac ELR hybrid.
The same risky strategy — gambling on relatively untested technology — drove massive investments by Toyota Motor Corp in the Prius hybrid and Nissan Motor Co in the Leaf electric car.
Toyota said it now makes a profit on the Prius, which was introduced in the United States in 2000 and is now in its third generation. Sales of the Prius hybrid, which comes in four different versions priced as low as $19,745, have almost doubled so far this year to 164,408.
Other such vehicles haven't done nearly as well. Nissan's pure-electric Leaf, which debuted at the same time as the Volt and retails for $36,050, has sold just 4,228 this year, while the Honda Insight, which has the lowest starting price of any hybrid in the U.S. at $19,290, has sales this year of only 4,801. The Mitsubishi i, an even smaller electric car priced from $29,975, is in even worse shape, with only 403 sales.
Toyota's unveiling of the original Prius caught U.S. automakers off guard. GM, then under the leadership of Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz, decided it needed a "leapfrog" product to tackle Toyota and unveiled the Volt concept to considerable fanfare at the 2007 Detroit auto show.
The car entered production in the fall of 2010 as the first U.S. gasoline-electric hybrid that could be recharged by plugging the car into any electrical outlet. The Obama administration, which engineered a $50-billion taxpayer rescue of GM from bankruptcy in 2009 and has provided more than $5 billion in subsidies for green-car development, praised the Volt as an example of the country's commitment to building more fuel-efficient cars.
NEXT-GENERATION CAR
GM's investment in the Volt has so far been a fraction of the $5 billion that Nissan said it is spending to develop and tool global production of the Leaf and its associated technologies and the reported $10 billion or more that Toyota has plowed into the Prius and various derivatives over the past decade.
1. "A basic tenet of American capitalism is that supply precedes demand, as can be see in the case of all airports being closed down: the long lines of people unable to get to their destinations is the demand that cannot be fulfilled. This is why entrepreneurs must be given a free hand to produce, to speculate, as the building of more and more airports will lower prices, increasing demand.
This is especially true in the case of new technologies.
Both high taxation and over regulation place a damper on this freedom.
“The proceeds from these speculations? the capital paid for stocks and bonds ? may seem misspent. In the long run, the results are called infrastructure, and they are what economies are built on.”
“Many European postal systems, telegraph lines and railroads were built with government money, and sometimes with insufficient capacity. But
in the United States, instead of burdening taxpayers, we sell investors the equivalent of high-priced lottery tickets each time one of these technologies arrives.”
In Technology, Supply Precedes Demand - NYTimes.com
2. "The fundamentals of economic prosperity: the rule of law, property rights, freedom of contract, low marginal tax rates, the minimum regulatory barriers and costs necessary, sound money, and a stable dollar.
Needless to say, “too big to fail” is a policy of failure.
Peter Ferrara, “America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,” P. 240.
If I may broaden the topic.....the abject stupidity of
the 'big government' crowd, raise your paw, BoringFriendlessGuy, is highlighted in this thread.
This is only superficially about cars....it is about the function of government.
The same problem is seen in
taxation and for the same reasons:
a. conservatives see taxes as necessary to pay for legitimate government functions....as outlined in Article I, section 8, enumerated powers.
Any extra is given back in tax cuts.
b. Liberals, progressives, Democrats, socialists....see the purpose of taxation as a method of redistribution for purposes of material equality.
Rule #1: a nation can have prosperity or equality....not both.
