Chevy Forced To Extend Shutdown Of Bolt Plant After Realizing That Literally No One Wants A Bolt

General Motors launched it"s much-hyped, all electric Chevy Bolt at the end of 2016.  The Bolt was expected to make a splash as it was the first electric car in the U.S. market to offer 200 miles of driving range at an affordable price starting around $35,000.  The only problem is that pretty much no one seems to want one.

Unfortunately, that lack of demand is about to earn a bunch of UAW workers at GM"s Orion, Michigan plant an extended summer vacation.

As AOL Finance points out today, GM has managed to sell just over 7,500 Chevy Bolts through the first six months of 2017.  Moreover, since dealers are sitting on about 111 days worth of inventory, we"re going to go out on a limb and say the Bolt launch slightly underperformed expectations.  All of which has resulted in GM"s decision to extend the shutdown currently in effect at it"s Orion plant for just a little while longer.

General Motors Co has extended a shutdown at the Michigan factory that builds the new Chevrolet Bolt electric car as part of a broader effort to get control of bulging inventories of unsold vehicles in the United States.

"Shutdown periods vary by plant based on launch timing of new or refreshed models across the portfolio and our ongoing efforts to align production with market demand," GM said in a statement.

But it"s not just the Chevy Bolt that GM is having a hard time selling.  Overall, the company is battling a massive inventory glut, some 126 days of supplies, in passenger cars.  As such, the company has extended summer vacation shutdowns at three other North American assembly plants. The assembly plant at Lordstown, Ohio, that makes the Chevrolet Cruze and a plant near Kansas City, Missouri, that produces the Malibu sedan both have three additional weeks of downtime. An assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario, will be idled for two extra weeks to reduce inventories of the Chevrolet Impala large sedan.

Of course, this shouldn"t be much of a surprise for our readers as we recently pointed out that GM"s "channel stuffing" hit a new all time high for the restructured company in June 2017, with the number of GM vehicles parked at dealer lots and patiently waiting for a buyer rising to the highest since the summer before recession officially began, when GM was still pre-bankruptcy GM, with far greater (if ultimately superfluous and in need of restructuring) production.

All of which kind of makes you wonder just how well that other, highly-anticipated, mass-produced, affordable, all-electric vehicle will perform when/if it officially starts to ship later this year.

First Production Model 3 pic.twitter.com/TCa2NSUNI3

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2017

Volvo Just Announced It Will Ditch Gas-Powered Engines in All New Models by 2019

(ANTIMEDIA) — Providing further evidence that the day of the gas-powered car is all but done, one of the old guard members of the auto industry just announced that within two years, all its new vehicle models will be based on emerging technologies. From a Reuters report on Wednesday:

“All Volvo car models launched after 2019 will be electric or hybrids, the Chinese-owned company said on Wednesday, making it the first major traditional automaker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by the internal combustion engine.

“The Sweden-based company will continue to produce pure combustion-engine Volvos from models launched before that date, but its move signals the eventual end of nearly a century of Volvos powered solely that way.”

Volvo has plans to launch five new models from 2019 through 2021. Three of those models will be produced by Volvo itself, while two will be developed by Polestar, a subsidiary of the automaker that’s currently being reshaped to focus solely on electric vehicles (EVs) in an effort to compete with Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Speaking to Reuters about his company’s future investments, Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that at this point, dumping tons of cash into the development of fossil fuel-based technologies just doesn’t make sense.

“We of course will not be developing completely new generations of combustion engines,” he said, adding that part of Volvo’s strategy is to join the race to produce the fully-functional self-driving car. “This means that there will in future be no Volvo cars without an electric motor.”

One of the primary obstacles to the reality of roads full of EVs — and, eventually, self-driving cars — has been infrastructure. But as Anti-Media reported last week, this obstacle may not exist for much longer. From a June 30 article:

“Chargepoint, the company that maintains the largest network of EV charging stations on the planet, published press release Thursday announcing it had just secured $43 million in funding from Siemens, a corporation Chargepoint calls a ‘global powerhouse in electrical engineering and electronics.’

“The funding comes in addition to money provided by other investors with a stake in the game and brings the total for this latest round of Chargepoint’s financing to $125 million”

Additionally, it was reported last week that Chargepoint also just purchased all of General Electric’s EV charging stations, bringing the company’s total number of independently-owned spots to 36,000.

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Car Ownership to Plummet 80% by 2030 Thanks to Self-Driving Electric Cars: Study

(ANTIMEDIA) “We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. But there is nothing magical about it. This is driven by the economics.”

The man who said those words, Tony Seba, has just co-authored a new report with another man, James Arbib. Both are technology analysts, and if the predictions in their report are proven to be accurate, a monumental shift in the way human beings travel in cities is already underway.

Seba, a Stanford instructor and co-founder of the think tank RethinkX, and Arbib, a tech investor and philanthropist, say that private vehicle ownership in the U.S. will drop 80 percent by the year 2030 and that the common way to get around town will be self-driving electric cars.

Arbib and Seba also predict that the number of vehicles on U.S. roads will go from around 247 million in 2020 to around 44 million in 2030. According to the analysts, 2020 is also the year that global oil demand will peak. They predict the demand of 100 million barrels a day in 2020 will fall to 70 million barrels a day by 2030.

The analysts also predict that as people are zooming across town in self-driving electric cars, they’ll be doing so while sitting next to strangers. This “ride-share” concept is something Uber CEO Travis Kalanick considers to be the future of city transportation.

Reporting on the two analysts’ new findings, Business Insider described what such a future might look like:

“If the majority of Americans switch to autonomous, electric ride-shares, it could greatly affect how the US cities plan their streets. The report suggests that fewer cars will drive more miles by 2030, because ride-shares may never need to park. When they would drop off passengers, they would keep going to pick up new passengers, which would open up vast tracts of land for new uses, like wider sidewalks and more housing, parks, and zones where cars are banned.”

Seba and Arbib predict that by 2021, using electric ride-shares for transportation will be four to ten times cheaper per mile than buying a new car, which could translate to saving around $5,600 a year per household. That’s the “economics” Seba is talking about.

And it is, indeed, interesting. If the two men are correct, this continuing shift in the realm of transportation will have boosted Americans’ disposable income around $1 trillion by 2030.

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Tesla Just Passed Ford to Become the Second Most Valuable U.S. Automaker

(ANTIMEDIA)  — Riding a sudden wave of confidence about the soon-to-be-launched Model 3, Tesla, Inc.’s stock surged upward over the weekend, putting it above Ford in terms of market value.

On Sunday, Tesla reported its first quarter deliveries for 2017. The numbers were on the high end of what analysts were expecting. The electric carmaker has delivered 25,000 vehicles so far this year, up 69 percent from the same period in 2016.

Tesla previously forecasted it would deliver around 50,000 vehicles by the middle of 2017, and the first quarter numbers indicate the company will hit its mark.

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That tells investors that Tesla is probably on track with its launch of the Model 3, set to go to market later this year. As such, Tesla’s stock spiked to an intraday record of $294.15 on Monday.

The stock’s surge upward puts Tesla’s market capitalization at more than $47 billion, placing it above Ford’s $44 billion. Now General Motors, at $51 billion, is the only car manufacturer in the U.S. with a higher market value.

The Model 3, a sedan, will cost around $35,000. That’s about half as much as the cheapest Model S. The Model 3 is simpler and easier to make, and production will be heavily automated. The lower costs have analysts predicting a significant increase in Tesla’s overall sales.

Confidence in Tesla’s numbers, coupled with high expectations for the Model 3, have driven the company’s shares up 30 percent since the beginning of the year.

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