Volts: Folks Don't Want 'em, Neither Do the Dealers

President Obama and his Green Crew have hitched their wagon to the heavily subsidized Chevy Volt to satisfy the far left environmental extremists in the party. He is also hoping the Volt takes off so that he can justify his continued assault on US energy producers (elimination of the coal industry and no permits for the Keystone pipeline).

It hasn’t quite worked out how they thought it would. General Government Motors had predicted hot sales for the electric hybrid, thinking 10,000 would be a reasonable goal. For 2011 only about 7,600 Volts were sold, not even coming close to the goal.

And now it seems that even the dealers don’t want them. This is from The Foundry:

Automotive News gives an example this morning in the New York City market where last month, GM allocated 104 Volts to 14 dealerships in the area and dealers took just 31 of them, the lowest take rate for any Chevy model in that market last month. The group of dealers orders more than 90% of the other vehicles they were eligible to take…

In Clovis, Calif., Brett Hedrick, dealer principal at Hedrick’s Chevrolet, sold ten Volts last year. But in December and January he turned down all six Volts allocated to under GM’s “turn-and-earn” system, which distributes vehicles based on past sales volumes and inventory levels. GM’s “thinking we need six more Volts is just crazy,’ Hedrick said to Automotive News. “We’ve never sold more than two in a month.” Hedrick says he usually takes just about every vehicle that GM allocates to him. (Source: The Foundry) (h/t: Doug over at Director Blue)

I wonder how long it will be before Obama requires dealership to take possession of all the Volts GM allocates. Does anyone think that the current administration won’t force GM to put together some sort of policy that dealers must take the allocations of the Volts? And I am sure that shortly after this policy is put into place, GM will then begin to publicize the number of Volts sent to dealerships, rather than actual cars sold, as the stats used to show Volt “success.”