Chevrolet Volt tops Sierra Club ranking of plug-in hybrids

Prius was configured to achieve profit without change, and it did.

Volt most definitely was not, and will not. Quite a bit of reconfiguring is needed still.

That's a fundamental difference you cannot just overlook or dismiss.

 

John, that is just nonsensical.
All cars change as the years go by.
Heck, the first gen Prius was a sedan, and the second was a hatchback.
I suspect this was a big part of its success and the reason the second gen brought in the era of profitability for Toyota.

 

That's quite surprising to hear, because there's no debate these aren't true...

Horsepower/Torque = OVERKILL

Battery-Capacity = OVERKILL

Neither was a necessity at that level. The configuration so easily could have been different. Reduce them to reduce cost, which would result in a vehicle with a chance of achieving profit. GM's decision was not to.

 

John, battery capacity is not only not overkill, it is what many people are calling for.
The 2013 actually increased capacity, and rumor is the 2014 will increase it again.

No newly designed car is going to be profitable the day it starts production.
The sales of the Volt are picking up, no not as fast as GM's marketing predicted, but it is still a positive trend line.

So at some point in the future, I don't see why the Volt would not be profitable.

 

Please stop making up such crap. You know that is not accepted fact. The only way its right there no point in debating, is if they are absolutely false. But I doubt you agree with that. If you want to suggest they are OVERKILL provide supporting evidence.

The volt's battery capacity was designed so 85% of people could do their daily commute with it. That's just aiming to be able to support mainstream needs.

The horsepower of 149 would rank it 150th lowest out of over 1000 cars/models on sale in 2013. (From http://cars.findthebest.com/d/y/2013) Eyeballing the top sales chart I'd say only about 3 in the top 2 selling vehicles and may 15% of all vehicles sold have lower HP... so its well below the median.

I do agree we don't need that much power.. just like we don't need cars at all, bikes and horses worked for a century or more, who needs cars. But if one wants to compete in a market its important to understand the long-term models of that market and what sells. Power sells.

 

As far as Toyota my view would be EV has become a USA centric technology post-Tsunmai, with lower interest in Japan. Toyota would have had to shift EV production to US and design cars just for USA tastes. They might not have minded to go that direction, but during planning they would have had no idea about the Tsunami and the huge shift to hybrids in Japan. Lots of you are saying EV is the "way to go" and Toyota is behind, but keep in mind you are voicing US political idea that we need plug-ins over hybrids. Also all the successful plug-ins Tesla, Leaf, Volt are made in America, because we are ground zero for Plug-ins.

 

GM built the car they wanted to sell not the one they needed to.

 

What do you mean?
GM needs to sell SUVs and trucks to make profit.
GM sells the VOLT to be technology ahead.

 

Few people consider the Prius models to be overpowered yet the Volt isn't really that much faster overall. It's just capable of accelerating strongly in EV without all of the noise and high RPM thrashing about that the Prius has to resort to with the gas engine.

The reason it can do that is because it has a bigger battery that can put out 111 kW versus the smaller Prius pack that can output less than 40 kW. Size matters. Many people value a non-blended EV-only driving experience and are willing to pay a bit more for that feature.Given the Lithium Ion battery technology we have today, a pack size that generates sufficient kW to allow EV-only driving also happens to give around 40 miles of driving range.

I don't consider the Volt's range to be excessive at all but clearly some drivers could get by with less while others would still need to recharge during the day to avoid using gas. A 40 mile range feels like a good compromise. The 10-15 mile range of the Prius is clearly not enough for many people and was presumably dictated by space and packaging considerations as well as price. The size of the Ford Energi pack seems like a better performance compromise but the reviews indicate that it has insufficient acceleration at highway speeds. The energy and power capacity of the Volt seems like a good lower-bound choice for the combination of performance and EV range. The only issues I see are space (only two seats in back) and price.

The space issue can be taken care of with modest improvement in packaging and battery technology. The price issue seems to be on track to be resolved by battery technology improvements in the next 5 years along with volume production and incremental manufacturing improvements.

Better Lithium-rich cathodes, silicon-enhanced (not silicone enhanced...) anodes, and higher voltage-tolerant electrolytes are all in the commercialization phase and companies like Envia and others are developing production-ready cells which incorporate all 3 of those improvements in that timeframe. We don't need to wait for longer horizon technology like Lithium-air or Lithium-sulfur batteries.

Miracles are not required to further bring down the production costs of 40 mile EREV vehicles like the Volt. It's going to happen and we're going to look back at PHEV-10 cars the same way we look back at PCs that were limited to 640K of addressable memory.

As I've said here before, you should stop insisting that GM redesign the Volt to fit your 2013 idea of the perfect mainstream car. Leave the Volt aloooone! What you really seem to want is for GM to build a Prius HEV competitor with a cheaper and simpler one-mode E-CVT transmission together with a carefully matched and Atkinsonized gas engine.

Can we both agree on that?

 

John,

You keep digging yourself a bigger hole.
Your assertio athat the original prius was built to make a profit without any changes is contradicted by toyota itself, and just doesn't stand up to any smell test.

Maybe your assertion really is that the prius phv was designed to not change and is profitable right now. Well I really don't know if that was a goal, and highly doubt it, but.... If the goal of the current phv was to be profitable off the bat toyota has failed miserably. Listen, they can redesign, but it just isn't selling well, even compared to lower expectations. The bmw i3 is going to join the hunt soon, giving even more competition. None of the new entrants since toyota have stove to keep battery range down to 11 miles, I doubt that many owners are saying the prius phv or the volt is too fast. I really don't understand where this non-sense comes from. Some have said the volt and prius phv is too expensive, and the 2014 looks to have a price drop, we just don't know yet how big. Costs have been cut on the volt, and as last months sales figures show, the volt seems to sell much better than the prius phv. Do you think it really is too powerful? Compared to what? The new spark ev gets better acceleration.

 

Since my stance from the very beginning is that GM offer something affordable, then whatever else they desire in addition, there is nothing to agree with.

One size does not fit all.

That is what actually happened.

The Prius rolled out to the world did indeed achieve profit without change.

Such denial of history is amazing.

 

You mean your own denial of history?

The gen II prius had huge changes versus the gen I, as anyone can plainly see, and the prius was not profitable until 2006 or 2007, if covering R&D, or earlier in the gen II if covering production costs. Are you really claiming there were no changes between the first and second generation? It is hard to believe that you have staked out that position, and are sticking to it, and wish to be taken seriously.

As car and driver said, the prius (gen I) was a technological wonder, but more of a promise of where the technology could go.

 

I can understand why Toyota would be hesitant post-tsunmai, but they weren't a pack leader pre. The i-MiEV first became publicly available in Japan and Europe in 2010. Same year that the Leaf hit Japan and the US. We know Nissan is making a major investment with BEVs, and they planned to build manufacturing for the Leaf in all their major markets. Mitsubishi may not be as invested, but they offer the i-MiEV nationwide and elsewhere. So it is more than just a compliance vehicle.

The Fit EV only became available now, and is just a lease, but Honda as made it available outside California. The fact they included the Northeast shows they might be serious about future BEV models. Their reason for the lease is that they wanted to gather real world data. They could have limited release to California for compliance purposes, but data on performance in harsh winters wouldn't be possible.

The tsunmai might have given Toyota an excuse to abandon the BEV market, but they weren't really interested since the beginning. FT-EV concepts weren't unveiled until 2009, the same year that the i-MiEV was available to some fleets. They were behind. Without the Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicle to spur them on, we probably wouldn't have a Prius today.

 

I honestly don't understand what you are saying or how that responds to what I said.

Can you rephrase or expand on your reply?

 

That has nothing to do with the fact that gen 1 achieved profit.

The gen 2 changes were to expand reach, to attract a wider audience.

Cost were extremely high priorities in both. That clearly was not the situation for gen 1 of Volt.

 

I agree that Toyota likely designed the prius phv to suit what they thought were Japanese tastes. You can see this from a lot of their marketing collateral material. Nissan attempted a world car, but had high expectations of great sales in Japan with the leaf. Neither car sold nearly as well as expectations in Japan, and most analysts thought nissan was much too optimistic with the leaf, but I did not hear the same about the prius phv. I don't think that the tsumami really affected Japanese tastes directly either, these cars were just misses in that market. Government tax policy that really encournagd hybrid buying though, which was a result of the bad economy from the tsunami really helped hybrid sales especially the prius liftback. Japanese tastes though really seem to like the aqua (prius c) much more than the prius phv. The Japanese government has given much more money to plug-ins than the US, but they also have devoted much more to hybrids and fuel cells.

IMHO Toyota needs to design its plug-in not just for the us market, but the japanese market as well. That likely keeps the range bellow 30 miles, and the rumors are somewhere just under 20. If they listen to american tastes, the car is likely to do better in Japan. Many things in the gen II redesign of the prius were for american tastes (more hp, more room) and it helped the car sell in japan as well. Here instead of more room the american tastes are for better handling and more of an ev experience. We should see next year if the rumors are true and they are designing for this.

Can you point to an authoritative source that says this? Your yardstick on the volt is that it pays back the R&D, correct. Everything I have seen says the prius was not profitable in that way in gen I.

It was definitely a good idea in gen I. It showed technology leadership that helped sell other toyota cars (marketing value). At the end they say the cars may even have been able to cover their variable costs. But these things are likely true of the volt as well.

Again, its been a long time since I read up on this, but Toyota on gen I priced it lower to the consumer to spur sales, eating a large part of the extra costs in Gen I. MITI subsidized this loss. In Gen II many costs were reduced, they were while it was on the line. No one at toyota thought the prius would be profitable in its first generation, it was an investment in the future of the company. The improvements in gen II made the R&D in gen I pay off.

Perhaps you are thinking of these anouncements
Toyota Says It's Now Turning a Profit on the Hybrid Prius - Los Angeles Times

The volt is probably at the same point today. They aren't losing money on each new car, they are likely making some, but they have future warranty costs and R&D to pay off. The volt needs a much lower volume than the prius did to be profitable. Sales of the gen I never reached volumes that toyota stated would be needed to be profitable. Sales of the Gen II hit these levels in 2004, but it likely took until 2006 or 2007 depending on who you read for them to pay back R&D. Part of the difference in dates is analyst had to guess how much MITI kicked in, toyota and and MITI do not fully disclose these figures.

Only time will tell whether the gen II volt achieves profitability, but we should not have a false history of the prius to claim it needs to be profitable today. The true prius history says car companies are often paid back for investing in new techology, even if it takes a couple of generations. The first generation tesla roadster did not make the company profitable, but the second gen tesla S appears to be doing just that. It just is a question of the number of years it takes to pay back that R&D.

 

From Prius, profits and promises make an interesting story - Orlando Sentinel

Then this blog said, "It is a much published fact that the Classic Prius (THS) did make a profit the final year of its production."
- John's Stuff - Toyota Prius Personal Log 123

It all boils down to how the R&D for THS and HSD is accounted for.

 

No it doesn't. In the 2001 LA times article I sited Shigenobu Uchikawa said the Prius was not profitable. Watanabe said it had reached the profitable point. What these mean is quite spelled out in the article. Watanabe only means they are covering the variable costs. They no longer are losing more money the more they produce. Uchikawa clearly states they are not covering their fixed costs. Irv Miller in the article you sited says the prius was not making money in the first generation, but is in the second. The second generation prius is where toyota reached profitability according to all three of these toyota executives. In 2004 toyota was selling enough gen II prii to have reached Uchikawa's definition. Those outside the company did not have access to some of the information, and if volumes dropped in say 2005, then the prius would not have covered the fixed costs. In hindsight we can say profitable in 2004, but we needed until 2006 or 2007 to turn those sales forecasts into actual sales. That is why I use the later number, but can agree with Miller on 2004 being the profitabilty year. Miller also allocated a lot of R&D to other vehicles not yet built. Still R&D on the gen I can be considered a sunk cost, and only R&D on the gen II needs to be considered in profitability of the genii. Miller seemed to be saying in 2004, the gen II was covering its manufacturing costs, along with sales and marketing. The Gen I didn't even cover these costs let alone pay for any of the R&D.

We have a blogger that claims otherwise. He has posted no evidence that the gen I was profitable or even explained why he disagrees with these toyota executives.

One thing we should agree to is that the definition of profitability for toyota should be the same one as the definition for chevy.

 

All,

Isn't this a pointless argument, in that, no company is going to tell us how much it really costs for R&D for a particular technology, nor how much it actually costs to make each car. In addition, the costs to make each car may or may not include health care costs, pension costs, warranty costs etc. Company press releases are going to give whatever spin they want and put in or leave out so many potentially significant costs that it isn't really possible to compare.

Mike

 

That is the purpose of raising doubt.

Without that, the delay-to-nextgen excuses fall apart.