http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/bu...QuSa+25qQ+SyAw
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Originally Posted by By MICHELINE MAYNARD
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The Volt is a big long-term bet. New vehicles typically cost $1 billion to develop, and the Volt requires new technology that probably inflated that price tag even more.
G.M. says the car, which is scheduled to arrive in showrooms two years from now, will be able to travel 40 miles on a charge, but it will also have a small gas engine to extend the range to as much as 640 miles using both the battery and gasoline (the 1.4 liter, four-cylinder engine is intended to run a generator that will power the car and recharge the batteries once they are depleted). It is expected to cost about $40,000.
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Many car makers, including Mitsubishi, Nissan and BMW, have plug-ins under development. Toyota said last year that it was working on a plug-in hybrid vehicle that would be available by 2010, meaning it could conceivably beat the Volt.
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It plans to sell only 10,000 Volts in the car’s first year, or less than the number Prius cars sold by Toyota in October alone. And the Volt, roughly the size of a small family sedan, will cost around $15,000 more than a Prius.
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When General Electric was a world-class engineering company, it maintained an active research and development lab. Part of the "tax" of doing business, GE maintained a brain-trust that was available so when a program or project ran into a 'hard problem,' there were skill scientists and engineers who could address these problems. So I'm amused as this 'accounting' requirement that development costs for a vehicle goes with the vehicle.
Development of a new vehicle is the wrong attitude ... it needs to be development of a new technology first expressed in one model but soon adapted across the whole line. So we see in this article the same claim made by "CNW Marketing" about the Prius that the development cost made it much more expensive than the Hummer. So when I see this article citing both GM and the "Ann-Arbor Center for Automotive Research" trying to address the same nonsense they had distributed via the "CNW Marketing" release, well the chickens are coming home to roost.
Bob Wilson
What goes around, comes around ...
