Featured Bolt the cannibal and used hybrid/plug-in generator

I remember a very similar post about the volt about 6 years ago (from both you and chevy)

I do find the whole, here are the 3 guys that got a car ad campaign strange, still not as terrible as some of the PRII ads I saw in the past.

Time will tell I suppose.

 

gm has started delivering bolts, what's the question?

 

Bolt the cannibal? Sounds like a game. pin the tail on the donkey, bell the cat...

 

You can't expect someone in the market for a $30,000 vehicle to cross shop a small hatchback. They're looking at the family sedan, CUV, or other at this price range. The only people cross shopping are those that came from fuel efficient vehicles.

I'd argue this does 'kick the can down the road' although indirectly. The previous cars from these first three owners will go on the used market. Only this time with much steeper depression on BEV's than gasoline vehicles, they will have a better chance at attracting the hopefully former gas-only car buyers.

 

I had to deal with a tremendous amount of that when pointing out how Volt was following in the path of Two-Mode. The pattern was remarkable too. This repeat chase-the-halo episode is worse though, since there's a such a heavy dependency on tax-credits. The consequence will be stifled availability followed by an abrupt loss of interest. It's a disaster in the making, even without taking into consideration the other choices that will be available.

We can see the strides Nissan & BMW will be making, with some odd "me too" effort on VW's part. That will add a lot of pressure to GM's growing struggle to capture the interest of their own customers. With respect to Tesla, how can there be any comparison? The difference between Model 3 and Bolt is obvious. They clearly aren't targeted at the same audience. As for Ford, who knows. We could see interesting things from Chrysler though.

That brings us to Toyota. The potential Prius Prime offers for winning hearts of showroom shoppers is profound. The effort to transform the hybrid we've grown quite attached to very real competition with traditional choices is becoming difficult to dispute. It's come down to the basics. You don't have to do anything other than plug it in to get absolutely outstanding results. The interface is elegantly simple. There's nothing to learn and nothing to set up. It's a "just drive it" design with realistically profitable configuration.

That's why looking at Bolt makes you wonder. GM expended quite a bit to deliver maximum range, making sacrifices resembling sales problems of the past. Why was the formula for achieving something able to compete on the showroom floor so carelessly abandoned?

 

Since I bought my 1st Prius 4 years ago I have convinced 3 friends to buy one. I always brag about my gas mileage and savings. You really can't appreciate the money you save until you own one.

 

ok i get it . . . canibal as in eating sales of similar cars. But are there any 200 mile moderately priced ev's?
For now - the bolt (a kind of small & not too sexy looking car) only matches range of the much more luxurious Tesla.
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i think a 240 mile bev might get some peoples attention. would i like to see a larger 150 mile bev? yes. hopefully, someone is thinking along those lines. i'm not sure there's any reason to criticize gm for doing more than any other mfg right now.

 

No.

Taking away sales from other automakers is: CONQUEST

Taking away sales from other vehicles within that automaker's own product-line is: CANNIBAL

In other words, cannibal doesn't achieve the goal of growth from within. In this case, we can clearly see GM is putting Bolt against Volt. There are only so many tax-credits available, making the concern of spreading too thin very real. Look at it this way, how are they going to promote those choices? The point of Volt was to overcome "range anxiety" from having an EV with a small battery-capacity... a limitation Bolt doesn't have. Mixed messages to consumers will just keep those mainstream buyers away, rather than attract them. What will draw their interest?

It boils down to loss of focus. Rather than sticking to the purpose of replacing traditional vehicles with clean & efficient choices, we are seeing a king-of-the-hill battle. Where's the effort to attract Malibu, Cruze, and Equinox buyers?

 

Prius Maximus, you have a nice record of totaled cars in your tally....

 

GM's sale predictions for the Volt, and Toyota's for the PiP, were overestimated. This 30k to 80k sales for the Bolt is coming from someone outside of GM. I don't recall what GM themselves have said about sales expectations.

Toyota has predicted the same number of Prime sales for the first year has the same for the PiP. Though the glogal distribution is different, and the Prime has a better shot if it gets nationwide in the first year.

In context of car sales, I take cannibal, and common appears to be, to refer to taking sales from models of the same brand or manufacturer.
The Prius is a gas only car.
The i3 may have been a REx, so that guy went gas free with a Bolt.
The Bolt has almost three times the range of the Spark EV, which could mean more EV miles for that other guy.

But I get your point. These customers likely were some of the first to get an EV or hybrid, and have been waiting for a 200+ mile BEV. I expect that to be true for most of the early Bolt buyers. Just as it appears many Prime buyers had a Prius or PiP before. Just like the Prime having record first month sales, who got the first Bolts isn't going to matter as much as who and how many are buying the cars a year from now.

 

all I clearly see is that that's a possible guess.
Now - what I clearly see is, my old car pool partner just went to the Chevy dealership & put down money for a Bolt because he wanted/needed a solid all-electric range of 125 miles for his daily commute from disney to the top of ortega hwy & back .... & he wanted a bit of a buffer beyond that ... and he didn't want to mess with gas & oil changes & smog checks anymore. And the notion of refueling all this from his own rooftop array was equally enticing. None of that criteria was met by The Volt.

I respect that you clearly see that too. But from my car pooler's example, I clearly see that GM got a sale that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise - simply because GM rushed the bolt to Market before Tesla's model 3 could snatch the sale away from GM.
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Ultimate greenwashing games have begun... Taking about drawing conclusions with virtually no data available. That's even worse than cherry-picking. We certainly don't want to repeat that history, again.

Remember what happened with "Volt" buyers?

 

Ok - canabal (eating your own kind) .... humans MAY eat their neighbors ... or humans MAY eat their own family.
With autos (eating their own kind) manufacture MAY eat their own sales or the other guys sales. You can get more pigeonhole nit picky & call it a conquest if it's not YOUR family or company if that floats your boat -
If you REALLY want to see whose eating the other manufacturer's lunch - you need look no further than the luxury auto industry - because the likes of BMW, MB, Porsche et al, are all scrambling to get their high profit lunches back.
The Myth of the ‘Tesla Killer’: it’s time to retire the term and focus on the tech [Op-ed] | Electrek
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The great thing about analyzing a dataset of three is the attention to detail that can be mustered to the effort.

 

Aren't you getting a Prime? Don't you now own a PiP?
I'm only going by posts here. Those Prime buyers posting appear to have owned a Prius of some type in the past.

That's the line following the on you quoted. It is an indirect admission that more data is needed, and a month's of sales or three buyers does not a trend make.

 

Regarding cannibals and conquests, context matters.
Toyota has seen a steady stream of early adopter Prius owners leave for *EV pastures. To the extent that Prime keeps those people in the Toyota fold the car is a success for the company even without conquests, and the transition to a PHEV of any kind while passing on a used Prius to someone else is a good thing (TM).