President Obama wants America to have one million electric vehicles (EVs) on the road in four years (2015). Based on the latest sales data for the Chevrolet Volt - the government-backed, green automotive Hail Mary from Detroit - Obama's goal isn't going to be met.It's all a pipe dream, a dream in which a bunch of underpowered and short range EVs save us all from...well, everything.
In fact, it's not even going to be close. What it will be is a very long time before anything remotely approaching a million Volts will be tooling around on U.S. roads.
While GM sales overall were up 46 percent, Volt sales fell from 321 in January to 281 in February, a 12 percent decrease. At 281 monthly sales, it will take more than 3,558 months, or nearly a decade.
The outlook is even worse for Nissan's widely heralded Leaf. The Japanese firm sold just 67 Leafs (Leaves?) in February, compared to 87 in January, for a 23 percent decrease. At that rate, there won't be a million EVs on the road for 41 years.
An irreverant friend (who should remain anonymous) suggests that these poor sales figures are best explained by the fact customers were prevented from going to Chevrolet and Nissan showrooms by those global warming-induced blizzards, tornadoes and floods, especially in the Midwest and South.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
A Million Electric Vehicles by 2015?
It isn't going to happen, as Mark Tapscott explains:
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2 comments:
My kids live 6 hours from us, so for us to have an electric car, by the time we got half way there, we'd have to turn around and come home. No way will those electric cars ever replace our big, gas guzzling autos!
Electric cars were fairly popular back in the early days of automobiling--easy to use, fairly simple to work on. But they lost out to gasoline just the same--they couldn't go the distance.
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