Tag Archives: GM

Chery Unveils Plug-in Hybrid, Trumps GM Volt’s Range

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Good news for cutting crude consumption some day, bad news for GM.

Chery Unveils Plug-in Hybrid, Trumps GM Volt’s Range

by Tian Ying

Feb 20 (Bloomberg) — Chery Automobile Co., China’s largest maker of own-brand cars, unveiled its first plug-in hybrid, touting a range more than twice as far as General Motors Corp.’s planned Volt.

The S18 can travel as much as 150 kilometers (93 miles) using just its batteries, Chery said in a statement posted on its Web site yesterday. GM’s Volt, due to go on sale next year, has a range of 64 kilometers. Chery has no timetable as yet on when the S18 will go on sale, spokesman Jin Yibo said in an interview by phone today.

China has encouraged domestic automakers to develop alternative-energy vehicles to curb oil imports and pollution, as well as to help the local industry challenge GM and Toyota Motor Corp. overseas. BYD Co., the Chinese automaker backed by billionaire Warren Buffett, started selling the world’s first mass-produced plug-in hybrid in December.

The Chinese government plans to support domestic automakers’ research into alternative-energy vehicles in a bid to have 60,000 on the roads of 10 cities by 2012, Science Minister Wan Gang said in November.

Automobiles account for about half of the total oil consumption in China, the world’s largest vehicle market behind the U.S. That may rise to 60 percent by 2020, according to the Development Research Center of the State Council.

Plug-in cars can be recharged from standard household powerpoints. The S18 can be fully charged in as little as four hours and be 80 percent powered via a quick charge at a specialist station in 30 minutes, Chery said.

Subsidies

BYD’s F3 DM can run for 100 kilometers using only batteries. It takes as little as seven hours to fully charge and can be 50 percent powered via a quick charge at a specialist station in 10 minutes.

To help support the development of alternative-energy technologies, the Chinese government plans to give out subsidies of as much as 600,000 yuan ($88,000) per vehicle to public- transport operators and government agencies to help fund purchases of electric, hybrid and fuel-cell automobiles.

Chrysler LLC, the third-largest U.S. automaker, is forecasting sales of battery-powered cars exceeding 100,000 a year by 2013 and GM is counting on selling 60,000 of its first such model in the year after it goes on sale in 2010.

Gasoline-electric hybrids and other electric vehicles made up 2.2 percent of the U.S. market in 2007, according to J.D. Power & Associates, which expects that share to expand to 7 percent by 2015.


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Re: The myth of GM’s overpriced “help”

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(email exchange)

Thanks!

>   
>   On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:26 AM, wrote:
>   
>   Why don’t people get their facts straight? Blind ideology divorced from >   facts was the basis of the last 8 years! When are we going to learn?
>   
>   From Felix Salmon (Professor Zhen should see this as well):
>   

The return of the 70 per hour meme

You might expect it from right-leaning commentators like Will Wilkinson. You wouldn’t expect it from someone like Mark Perry, who lives in Flint, Michigan. And you certainly wouldn’t expect to see it in the New York Times, from the likes of Andrew Ross Sorkin. But all of them are perpetuating the meme that the average GM worker costs more than $70 an hour, once you include health and pension costs.

It’s not true.

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM’s total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers.

Now that GM’s healthcare obligations are being moved to a UAW-run trust, even that fictitious number is going to fall sharply. But anybody who uses it as a rhetorical device suggesting that US car companies are run inefficiently is being disingenuous. As of 2007, the UAW represented 180,681 members at Chrysler, Ford and General Motors; it also represented 419,621 retired members and 120,723 surviving spouses. If you take the costs associated with 721,025 individuals and then divide those costs by the hours worked by 180,681 individuals, you’re going to end up with a very large hourly rate. But it won’t mean anything, unless you’re trying to be deceptive.


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GM bailout

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Seems to me GM and the banks need the same thing: people who have sufficient income to buy cars and make mortgage payments.

In general, direct public spending is for public goods: military, legal system, various infrastructure, etc.

To support private sector output the way to go is to support demand, and let consumers decide which products succeed and which don’t.

If government had declared a payroll tax holiday (treasury makes the fica payments for employees and for the business) three months ago, car sales would be up and mortgage delinquencies down.

And don’t forget to toss in something that reduces fuel consumption sustain our real terms of trade.


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