They can't even sell these fire traps with us subsidising $40,000 on each one. General Motors has temporarily suspended production of its Volt electric car, the company announced Friday. GM, which is based in Detroit, announced to employees at one of its facilities that it was halting production of the beleaguered electric car for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees. http://thehill.com/blogs/transporta...es/213889-gm-halting-production-of-chevy-volt
Reposted: Well, first off GM lied and claimed it was an electric vehicle with onboard generator. It wasn't. The car was propelled by the onboard gasoline engine and not very efficiently at that. So it was a hybrid. A lousy hybrid. On electric power the vehicle had a range of 25 miles. Fine for some government bureaucrat commuting between Georgetown and K-street but ridiculous for real people. Then of course there was the vehicle's predisposition to BURN after a minor accident. Every see lithium burn? Think thermite. And then there was the way that GM screwed its bondholders and gave the company to the UAW basically assuring that no self-respecting republican would buy a GM product for perpetuity. GM says it will restart production at some point but it is laying off 1300 workers from the Volt factory. Yeah, they'll be rehired. Welcome to the 99-week boogie.
Another point of agreement. The volt is a crappy car. The original GM electric was pretty good, and of course, they scrapped it. You probably saw 'what happened to the electric car' - pretty stupid IMO. It's a simple thing to make a good electric car, but somehow GM missed it. c
Pelosi says that unemployment benefits stimulate the economy. So they'll go ahead and book that as 1300 jobs "created or saved".
The GM bailout worked, maybe not perfectly, but much better than the alternative to thousands or millions of workers and their families. And, America is back on top in the car market. Obama can't take all the credit, of course, but still a good thing overall. I know you guys can dispute it, but deep down, we still like to be No. 1 in the world. c
I prefer draft John Courage or Theakston's Old Peculiar in bottle to that nasty koolaid you are drinking. Bailing out GM is like flying a twin-engined aircraft. The second engine just carries you to the crash site.
Oh, come on. You want Detroit to fail? Where would buy your cars, in socialist europe or worse yet in Korea or Japan. LOL. I don't drink either sides kool-aid, and I hope you know it. You seem to be pretty centered most of the time, and I don't mean that in a bad way, how could one? R or D or Libertarian, we still want America to be number one I think, and this is a victory. Again, many better things to hitch a gop wagon to. c
I want businesses to operate on free market principles. That means going into bankruptcy and emerging when able if insolvent. GM would have entered bankruptcy and a judge would have arranged financing for continued operations and we would not have this colossal goat-fuck that is the Volt.