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