AppId is over the quota
Whereas most people would consider the company's 2009 bankruptcy as the pivotal turning point in the contemporary history of General Motors, I'm willing put my bet behind the 2007 launch of the Chevy Volt extended-range electric car.
No other product from GM had such a systemic effect within the corporation, shifting nearly overnight the idea of what's important for the company and its culture.
And while some of the motivation behind the car's debut might have been founded in a vacuous effort to rebrand the company's image, the Volt was an inherently positive move for the big company. Now, roughly a year before the car will go on sale, GM is making another move that might be as important as the Volt itself: it plans on building most, if not all, of the guts of the hybrid and electric systems within its own facility.
Boring? Hardly. When manufacturers made moves over the past decade to produce more and more electric vehicles, the one aspect of the strategy that I never understood was why they'd all want to purchase the important aspects of the technology -- batteries and electric motors -- from the same suppliers. This was the equivalent of moving to a PC computer model: components would be shared and commoditized, therefore making the real unique selling proposition of any product the way it's designed or the way it's serviced.
Since carmakers (via their franchised dealership model) have historically underwhelming customer service, this spelled out a future that hinged upon a car's styling alone. This seemed limiting and, in the long run, a curious business strategy.
Thankfully a few automakers are realizing the importance of keeping the secret sauce of electrification within their four walls. Honda and Toyota have built their own electric motors, but now the domestics are starting to move in-house and GM is farthest along on its path.
Helped in no small part by a $105 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, GM made a move last week to retool a transmission plant in Maryland to make the motors for the company's next generation of electric systems. The decision will create 200 jobs -- enough to stir local politicians in the Baltimore area to applaud the move -- but the larger impact of the decision will play out in the years to come.
This week I had the opportunity to speak with GM's Pete Savagian, director of the electric motors, who sees the move as necessary as the company tries to get the costs of the new systems down to something that everyone will be able to afford.
"When we look at our future we see a lot of electric motors in our cars," said Savagian. "And those electric motors have a great bearing on the affordability of the car, the mass of the car, the smoothness of the car, [the] efficiency of the car. So we think the time is right to expand our footprint beyond just the engineering of electric motors, but now into the manufacturing."
Listen to the full conversation with Savagian below:
But full-size pickups are taking longer to sell than earlier this year, before world-economy worries began anew. In Edmunds.com’s Days To Turn (DTT) metric, the measure of how long it takes to sell a vehicle once it reaches the dealer, full-size pickups generally have been taking longer to sell. Ford’s F-150 (top) went from a DTT of 44 in April to 55 at the end of August. The Chrysler Group’s Ram 1500 went from a DTT of 82 in April to 110 at the end of August. For GM’s Chevrolet Silverado, DTT climbed from 55 in April to 75 at the end of August.
Whatever the case, it is difficult not to correlate September’s engorged pickup sales figures to inflated incentives. According to Edmunds.com data, the TCI for Ford’s F-Series was $4,265 – a hefty spike from the F-Series’ $3,083 incentive in April. For the Chevrolet Silverado 1500, April TCI was $3,182 and the figure was a ripping $4,747 last month. For Chrysler’s Ram 1500, the incentives bulge went from $4,084 in April to $4,877 in September. Despite the domestic makers’ talk of ongoing efforts to align production with demand, September’s sizeable incentives figures on full-size pickup are similar to spending at the same time last year.
