GM slams Toyota, says its cars are just as fuel efficient
The flagship car in GM’s green product offering is the Chevy Volt, but the company is demonstrating that it’s making fuel efficiency gains with other models as well. It looks like consumers are noticing too because sales numbers GM has released are showing improvement. Could there be truth to GM’s claim that Toyota doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to green cars?
Mark LaNeve, vice president of GM North American Sales, Service and Marketing (apparently more responsibility means longer job titles at GM) faced Toyota dead on when he said:
Make no mistake about this . . . Asian automakers do not have a monopoly on fuel efficient vehicles. We have a full lineup of vehicles – including five hybrid models — that provide industry-leading value, great fuel economy and the best warranty coverage of any full-line automaker. Every month, more and more customers are choosing our brands when shopping for a high value, fuel efficient vehicle, according to GM.
GM provided several statistics to back up its claim, including:
- Increases in sales for the Chevy Malibu and Cobalt when compared to June last year
- Increases in sales for Saturn Vue, Sky and Aura
- Over 1,100 hybrids delivered in June
It’s also talking about progress on the Chevy Volt frequently, appealing to consumers who are sick of spending all of their disposable income on gas at the pump.
Those are positive highlights for GM, but the North American auto industry overall is suffering right now. Most of the major automakers saw a decrease in sales this June with Ford dropping 28%, Chrysler 38% and Toyota losing 21%. Surprisingly, GM dropped less, at 18.5%, according to AutoWeek.
In reality GM is still enduring a slump in business, but it’s good to see the company pushing strongly into the fuel efficient space. If it can build cars that rely on some sort of cheap alternative to gasoline (and the Chevy Volt is a good step in that direction), then its profits will come roaring back.
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July 3rd, 2008
PLease please please stop talking about the Volt, this site is so biased ist not funny, stop the *cough**cough* jouranlists from adding crap in their articles so they can feed their own personal vandetta’s against companies they dont like, no where in that statement from GM did they talk about toyota, yet this whole year i have only ever seen one company been slugged while discussing the Volt, and that is Toyota. Grow up
July 3rd, 2008
Um, could the author of this article (or perhaps GM) explain how a electric car is going to cost me less to operate than a gasoline car? Honestly, how much do I have to pay my electric company to charge up my Volt every night? Sure, the “pain at the pump” is reduced, to be replaced by the “pain at the plug”??? My electric bill is going to go up by how many hundreds per month? And who/how do I get a charge if there’s not enough electricity in my battery’s to make it home to my electric plug???