GM Ponders Battery Rentals
General Motors may have figured out a way to keep the cost of its promised Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric car at the sub-$30,000 mark it set when it first showed us the concept version of the plug-in electric car.
Reports are filtering up from Down Under -- we saw it first in the Energy Blog -- that a top GM official has said the company may decide to sell the car but require purchasers to rent or lease the batteries that are necessary to make it go.
In a speech in Australia last week, Nick Reilly, president of GM Asia Pacific, said that while the price of the car with batteries might be prohibitive, customers could "buy the car and rent or lease the battery, and the cost of leasing the battery would be the same, or less than, the cost they are paying today for petrol...If you offset the fuel costs, people can afford it."
Whether people would want to do the electric vehicle version of buying a gasoline-fueled car but only renting the engine, well, that's something the marketing gurus will have to tackle.
It would, however, give GM ownership of the batteries and relieve Volt buyers of having to worry about replacing them and recycling the spent ones when the original battery pack wore out...
GM has said it hopes to have the Volt ready for market by 2010 -- a goal many pundits think is a bit optimistic.
The Volt would require a new generation of lightweight, high-powered lithium-ion batteries to perform to the specifications GM has established for it. And many battery development specialists say the technology just isn't there yet.
- Posted by
- John O'Dell September 12, 2007, 7:20 AM
- Permalink
- Categories:
- Chevrolet, Plug-ins and Electric
The price point for any electric car is going to be critical and the savings have to be significant. If the Volt edges to $30K and the battery leasing saves you .10 cents on a gallon, that's not going to be good enough.
Perhaps if the Volt proves capable of being the PRIMARY vehicle in a household, it might be able to compete with a $30K gasoline car on its novelty and styling alone, even if it doesn't beat the gas car in mileage costs. Perhaps the Volt will cash in on the same "feel good marketing" that made the Prius successful despite its failure to deliver that elusive 60 mpg (more like 44 on a good day).
I don't think forcing people to lease the batteries is a good idea, especially after the whole "Who Killed the Electric Car" mess, when GM did lease-only and then took the cars back, angering and alienating the few allies they might have had.
People will get hysterical about GM being able to supply them with batteries in the future. At what point will they abandon that platform? It will happen at some point.