PHEV Prius Pricing According to Toyota V.P.

[hill]

What with $40,000 - $50,000 plug-in Prius prices being bandied about, Irv Miller, Toyota's corporate communications V.P. speaks out:

EV WORLD CURRENTS: Plug-In Pricing: The Real Numbers

As suspected, these numbers were drawn out of a hat. With so many after market PHEV's running around the landscape now days (and the garages that install them) bringing PHEV's total cost in for so much less, it's what I'd suspected.

On the OTHER hand, the article has pretty scary forecasts relating to the possible marketing / pricing for the Volt. A certain former GM exec states:
"Assume you will trade in your Prius when the Volt becomes available. The feds will probably put a $20,000 kickback on the price to move them. If they do not, Volt will not make it."

2010 will indeed be an interesting year.

[DeadPhish]

Again one has to distinguish between sticker price and net effective price after some soon-to-be-determined Tax Credit. The sticker price is what the buyer will have to commit to pay the vehicle maker upfront.

The buyer can't collect the Tax Credit at time of purchase unless the law is written like the C4C program...which is a possibility. I see a firestorm brewing in that case methinks. I can't imagine the Texas oil lobby sitting idly by seeing it's tax payments going to cancel the tax payments of Kalifornians and NyYawkers on the Left and Far Left coasts.

If however it's like the ongoing program where the Tax Credit can only be taken on the taxes due the following Apr 15th, subject to AMT of course, then it might quietly slip by. What if the Tax Credit was $7500 and the tax payer only owed $5000 that year? $15000 and the tax payer only owed $10000 that year?

Lots and lots of details....

[john1701a]

I find it amusing. To avoid making the same mistake GM repeats over and over again (over promise, under deliver), they just pick out a number easy to beat.
.

[rfruth]

How is it that the (full EV) Nissan Leaf is to be priced similar to a loaded Honda Accord ?

EV WORLD CURRENTS: Nissan Reportedly Pricing Electric Car Comparable to Honda Accord

[SlowTurd]

the volt would be nice if you had some place to plug in every night.



this doesn't really work for apartment dwellers

[hill]

Originally Posted by rfruth

How is it that the (full EV) Nissan Leaf is to be priced similar to a loaded Honda Accord ?

EV WORLD CURRENTS: Nissan Reportedly Pricing Electric Car Comparable to Honda Accord

Hi rfruth ... that's a pretty easy answer. You pay one thing for ICE power ... you pay one thing for EV power. Put them both together? Now you have to pay for both ... plus the integration mechanism that marries them together. So certainly the PHEV will be more expensive than an EV. Also, the jury is out as to whether the Leaf will actually be 'sold' with batteries ... meaning Nissan is still deciding if they'd rather lease the battery pack. Many don't like that idea. The upside (supposedly, if you buy into it) is that if/when the latest/greatest pack gets even more energy efficient, that makes it easier to move up to that newer/better design. That said, hundreds of pounds of batteries makes up a good chunk of the EV's cost ... so if you buy it without batteries ... then it's certainly easy to see why the Leaf could be sold on the cheap.

and yes deadphish I agree. Texas, as well as the multi-national oilie lobby won't simply roll over, lay down and play dead as they sense their strangle hold control of energy power slip away.

[hampdenwireless]

Originally Posted by rfruth

How is it that the (full EV) Nissan Leaf is to be priced similar to a loaded Honda Accord ?

EV WORLD CURRENTS: Nissan Reportedly Pricing Electric Car Comparable to Honda Accord

The price for the plug in is a little high. Ok.. Much higher then I expected. More and more it looks like I will get a 2010 Prius and get a kit to make it plug in. That total could be under or around $30,000.

[drees]

Originally Posted by hill

Also, the jury is out as to whether the Leaf will actually be 'sold' with batteries ... meaning Nissan is still deciding if they'd rather lease the battery pack.

Come on hill, you've got to at least read the entire first sentence before responding (emphasis mine)

Jon Gordon, an Associate Project Manager for BrN Engineering, Inc, in Seattle attended the Nissan Leaf Kickoff event in Seattle today and reports to EV World that Nissan is planning to price the car somewhere in the US$25,000-to-$35,000 price range, or somewhere comparable to a fully-loaded Honda Accord; and the battery will be included.

[Rybold]

Originally Posted by hill

Hi rfruth ... that's a pretty easy answer. You pay one thing for ICE power ... you pay one thing for EV power. Put them both together? Now you have to pay for both ... plus the integration mechanism that marries them together. So certainly the PHEV will be more expensive than an EV. Also, the jury is out as to whether the Leaf will actually be 'sold' with batteries ... meaning Nissan is still deciding if they'd rather lease the battery pack. Many don't like that idea. The upside (supposedly, if you buy into it) is that if/when the latest/greatest pack gets even more energy efficient, that makes it easier to move up to that newer/better design. That said, hundreds of pounds of batteries makes up a good chunk of the EV's cost ... so if you buy it without batteries ... then it's certainly easy to see why the Leaf could be sold on the cheap

Excellent point about an ICE or EV having one drive mechanism, but if you buy a PHEV you have to buy both. At the same time, if Honda can sell the Insight for $18K, and Toyota can sell the Prius for $23K, then all the PHEV adds is a power cord and some extra batteries, with the total still being below $29K if it's a mass market system.

I would much prefer that Nissan sell the battery separately. This way, down the road, third party companies can make batteries and compete with the auto manufacturers and it will bring the prices of batteries down. Additionally, Nissan, Toyota, etc, etc, won't be limited in vehicle production due to lack of batteries. They can let the consumer worry about that. If they make 1 million PHEV and EV Prius per year but can only produce 500K batteries (example), then the consumers will find another supplier for batteries. Companies will come out of the woodwork to sell batteries.

[Mike Dimmick]

Originally Posted by rfruth

How is it that the (full EV) Nissan Leaf is to be priced similar to a loaded Honda Accord ?

EV WORLD CURRENTS: Nissan Reportedly Pricing Electric Car Comparable to Honda Accord

Companies don't necessarily price their product based on how much it costs to produce. Microsoft and Sony have been subsidising their 'next generation' game consoles, selling them for less than production costs, and trying to make the money back on accessories and on their cut of the game prices. A lot of attention is paid to 'attach rate', how many games each owner has bought.

Given they're willing to blow untold millions on hydrogen nonsense, the car companies could choose to effectively subsidise the first few cars they sell, to make the price paid by the consumer more palatable. Toyota are believed to have done it for the first few years of the Prius. Not to mention that development costs are always up-front and amortized over every vehicle sold.

People are often price-reactive: frequently, if the item is expensive, and you halve your price, you sell more than twice the number of units, often orders of magnitude more, and the overall revenue is much greater than at the higher price. By selling more, the capital cost of setting up machinery is amortized over more units, and the same can apply to materials costs if the supplier can amortize their cost over more units. It's common to offer price breaks if packaging costs can be reduced, for example.

It's often seen that prices drop for a new technology as it takes hold, and this is usually assumed to just be automatic. Commonly, though, the machinery required to produce the product more cheaply is in fact far more expensive: it can only be afforded if the volume is sufficient to justify it. This is what tends to push mature markets into the hands of fewer and fewer players - the ability to raise the capital to buy the equipment to reduce costs, and beat the competition on price or extract more profit, is limited to the largest players and the smallest can't afford to compete any more. The next generation of processor factories - called fabs - can probably only be afforded by Intel. AMD are having to join forces with others to keep up. Most other chipmakers such as nVidia outsource production to companies like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co) who can only afford the fabs due to a massive number of contracts.

Anyway, if Nissan keep the price low, even if they make a loss on the materials for each car initially, they and their suppliers can potentially sell more of them, raise the capital to buy new production machinery to reduce the materials cost, and start to turn a profit after a while.