The Lease

The Volt will also be available as a 36-month lease for $350 per month with $2,500 due a lease signing (including security deposit, which could vary at the time of delivery). These prices, of course, assume prime credit.

Volt Order Process

Speaking at the Plug-In 2010 conference, GM’s Vice President of U.S. Marketing Joel Ewanick also announced that starting today, participating Chevrolet dealers in initial launch markets will begin taking customer orders for the Volt. The Volt will initially be launched to customers in California, New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey, and Washington D.C.

To be among the first to purchase a Volt, customers can visit their nearest participating Volt dealer. A dealer locator will be available late today at http://getmyvolt.com

The dealer will begin the order process. From there, a dedicated Volt advisor will contact the customer and answer any questions to keep the buyer apprised of the progress of the order.

For those in need of more Volt-related information, Chevrolet will have a team of Volt advisors available to answer any questions starting today at 1-888-VOLT-4-U (1-888-865-8496).

Warranty

We found out how Chevy will warrant the Volt’s powertrain a few weeks ago, but today’s announcement revealed a few more details. The Volt’s 16-kWh lithium-ion battery pack carries an eight-year/100,000 mile warranty. In addition, Chevy will provide:

• 3-year / 36,000-mile bumper-to-bumper coverage
• 5-year / 100,000-mile roadside assistance and courtesy transportation
• 5-year/100,000-mile limited gas engine coverage
• 6-year/100,000-mile corrosion protection coverage

Safety

The Volt will be chock full of standard safety equipment, including eight air bags – dual-stage frontal, side-impact, knee, and roof-rail side-impact. StabiliTrak electronic stability control with Traction Control is also standard. The Volt is made of 80 percent high-strength steel for additional safety and protection.

Charging

The Volt will have a 120-volt charge cord standard, allowing owners to charge the EREV directly from a standard home electrical outlet. However, a total of 4,400 Volt buyers in the initial launch markets will have the opportunity to get a free 240-volt charging station as well as a free installation.

Live Web Chat

Later today, Volt Marking Director Tony DiSalle and Volt vehicle line Director Tony Posawatz will host a live video web chat at 4 pm Eastern/1 pm Pacific to answer any consumer questions about the Volt’s pricing.

Today’s announcement lays to rest nearly three years’ worth of speculation, which is older than GM Authority! How will GM price the Volt’s Opel-, Vauxhall-, and Buick-badged twins is unknown at this point, but we expect those to carry an equivalent price as the U.S. Volt, only in each respective currency.

We’ll be conducting our initial drive of the Volt in the coming weeks, so stay tuned to GM Authority and welcome the age of the Volt Age!

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View Press Release

The Indonesian market represents a massive growth opportunity for General Motors at a time when our favorite automaker can use all the headway it can get. Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest country and accounted for the sale of 483,000 vehicles last year. While that may seem like a paltry amount, especially when compared to double-digit annual sales in the U.S. and Canada, analysts expect volume to reach 1.3 million units over the next five years – which equates to a 170 percent growth rate. GM, which only markets its Chevrolet brand in the country, was responsible for an insignificant 0.5 percent of the market. As such, it would like to control a larger slice of the Indonesian car pie, with hopes of reaching the 10 percent mark.

While expansion plans are unclear at the time of this writing, GM locals in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, have said that the company is looking to reestablish a plant on the outskirts of the city. Tim Lee, President of GM International Operations, said that he is “very, very optimistic” about the opportunities in the country.

“A Very, Very Good Brand”

What’s more, General Motors is looking to capitalize on its reputation in Indonesia. One customer states that “Chevrolet is a very, very good brand. Every model is very good.” This is exactly the kind of image that GM wants for its brands all over the world and is the type of customer praise and encouragement that would cause more car shoppers to consider (and favor) GM products, resulting in a higher market share and a healthier bottom line. This customer recently purchased a Chevrolet Captiva for what is approximately $34,000 in his local currency (using current exchange rates). He bought the car for his growing family and financed the purchase, claiming that it was easy to find a loan.

Analysts expect the Indonesian automotive market to continue increasing as the nation’s political and economic environments stabilize. With industry volume hovering around 483,000 vehicles last year, growth is staggering compared to the 58,000 cars sold in 1998.

Most importantly, Indonesians associate the Chevrolet brand with quality and prestige, but also raised concerns about repair costs and the availability of parts compared to Toyota, the dominant brand in the country.

Growth and Competition

Speaking of parts and service, GM has 33 dealerships in Indonesia compared to Ford’s 35. And while Ford sold 6,477 vehicles there last year, GM only sold 2,616. However, GM sold 1,000 cars through the first quarter of 2010, acquiring 1 percent of the market, which points to the market’s tremendous growth opportunities and volatility.

GM’s Tom Lee continues, “we’re very underrepresented share-wise… we should be… at least 10%.” GM faces very strong competition from Toyota, which has 195 dealers and 58 percent of the market through the first quarter of 2010. Customers bought over 34,000 copies of the Toyota Avanza, a mini MPV, which is an increase of 62 percent compared to the same period last year. These results serve as an aspiration for GM in Indonesia.

Stabilization

As Indonesia’s political and economic environments continue to stabilize, the country’s market has grown in comparison to nearby Thailand, which previously was home to a much-stronger auto industry. According to the Freep, “Jim Castle, a Jackson native who is now a prominent consultant in Jakarta helping Western businesses operate in the country, expects consumers to purchase 650,000 cars this year.” This kind of growth is impressive and can be an important opportunity for General Motors.

The ease of financing, low interest rates, and a growing middle class are crucial to GM’s success in Indonesia. On the other hand, the lack of a developed infrastructure could inhibit expansionary efforts. Short trips on the country’s right-hand-drive streets can take hours due to insufficient and clogged roadways. The market can also be volatile, with 58,000 sales in 1998 and 387,000 the year before that.

J.D. Power expects that auto sales in Indonesia will continue their upward trend, with most of the growth concentrated in compact and midsize passenger car segments. The compact segment spiked 555 percent while the midsize segment shot up 422 percent in March 2010.

GM is working to expand its offerings in Indonesia and is bringing vehicles such as the Cruze and Captiva to market that appeal to young executives. Besides the Cruze and Captiva, Chevrolet offers the Aveo sedan (Kalos), Aveo 5 hatch, Optra Magnum (Daewoo Lacetti sedan), and Optra Wagon (Daewoo Lacetti wagon). Let’s hope The General acquires the 10 percent market share it’s shooting for… otherwise, it wouldn’t really be as global company as it hopes to be. Perhaps Indonesia (or the region of Oceania where the country is located) is due for its own geographic division analogous to the recently-created GM South America?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

[Source: Freep]

Communication

For starters, Cadillac is cutting all ties to General Motors in its corporate communications structure by changing email addresses from @gm.com to @cadillac.com. This will ensure that Cadillac customers – current or potential – will not see GM anywhere in their communications with Caddy.

Branding

Cadillac is also erasing the GM name and logo from marketing, promotional, and dealer materials. This means that the base signs of dealerships selling other brands will no longer carry any traces of GM.

Dealer And Buying Experience

What’s more, Caddy will no longer participate in GM-wide promotional events such as the Red Tag clearance event (as we learned late last year when Cadillac introduced its Season’s Best event).

Ads

Cadillac will also launch an all-new ad campaign later this month. According to GM spokesman Nick Twork, it will come before a model introduction at the New York International Auto Show on March 31. The ads will be the first from Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the New York agency GM hired in January to replace Modernista! of Boston. And to get it out of the way, we’re just as unsure about the new model introduction as you are… perhaps it will be the production version of the XTS flagship sedan?

“We’re in the process of revamping all the things that face the customer,” Twork said. “The Cadillac brand is best communicated as Cadillac without GM.”

Research

According to Susan Docherty, Vice President of Marketing for GM North America, the automaker is poised to begin research on how customers perceive the company. This may coincide with the long-awaited customer and sales retention tool spearheaded by Docherty.

“Consumers, in their minds, can separate out the corporation versus the brands,” Docherty said in an interview. “They can separate ‘Hey, I can still fall in love with a CTS coupe, but I may not necessarily be happy with the fact that General Motors had to go through bankruptcy.”

Big Change

For 2010, GM is looking to increase Cadillac sales by 28 percent to 140,000 units. The most loyal GM fans will realize that all this is in stark contrast to the strategy undertaken by The General five years ago, when the company decided in favor of unifying its brands under a single/central GM brand. That was also when GM added its mark of excellence to all vehicles, a move that the company reversed in mid 2009.

The GM Authority Take

The GM Authority Team welcomes this change with open arms. What matters is that people are buying Cadillacs, not GMs.

There are also those who don’t even know that Cadillac is a General Motors product. By distancing itself from GM, Cadillac will be following the most successful luxury brand in the United States – Lexus – which cut all obvious ties to parent company Toyota in early and mid-2000s.

Add the fact that not everyone agrees about GM’s $50 billion government-backed bankruptcy last year, and this is good news all around! The next step for Caddy is to become the status symbol brand it once was.

[Source: Bloomberg]

Yesterday, we reported on a recent interview by Chevrolet Brand Director Jim Campbell in which he discussed how Chevrolet will manage the supply-demand pressures of the new Volt when it comes to market. Part of the solution is to roll out the Volt in three initial markets: California, Michigan and Washington, DC (which sounds like a political move more than a marketing one to me). In any event, a staggered introduction to market may indeed help manage the initial demand for the Volt, but what would you say if I told you that the first customers to plunk down a deposit in those initial launch states will not necessarily be the first to drive the car home?

As absurd as this may sound, this is exactly what will happen. You see, behind the roll-out of any model lies a process used by GM called Dealer Allocation. Dealer Allocation is quite simply the number of units of a particular model a dealer will be able to acquire (and thus sell) in a given period of time. This number is usually formulated based on a combination of things. With respect to the Volt, I believe the allocation criteria will be formulated on the three following attributes: overall dealer performance, dealer sales of GM hybrid vehicles, and Toyota Prius sales in the area.

Dealer Allocation

Does this mean every dealer will get the same amount? Absolutely not – the bigger dealers who move the most product and who best meet the model’s allocation criteria (as I have outlined above) will be the ones that get more units. This means that your favorite Chevrolet dealer may earn 20 Volt allocations and the Chevrolet dealer down the street may earn only 2 in the same time period. Not only may the discrepancy be that large between neighboring dealerships, but that allocation number is not public information. This has an immense effect on pre-orders – those who have put down a deposit on a signed contract even before the cars start arriving to the dealership.

Preorders

The allocation number will tell all Chevrolet dealers exactly how many Volts GM will build for them over the first few months. Unfortunately, this does not constrain the dealership from pre-selling more of the hotly-anticipated PHEV than the earned allocation, as GM does not manage this process in any way. In other words, a dealer (knowing they only have two Volts arriving within the next six months) can pre-sell 20 Volts and simply tell the customer that the order has been put in. For the 18 customers who are at the bottom of the list, they are at the mercy of whatever story the dealer tells them regarding the production of the car. Dealers are under no obligation to disclose how many of their earned allocations are spoken for when making pre-order sales. As such, many dealers don’t disclose this information to the customer because if they did, you would probably walk right out the door.

And until the dealer is contacted by GM with their next Volt allocation number over the next time period, the dealership will have no idea when the pre-ordered Volt will arrive, leaving the buyer to the mercy of listening to dealer gaffle-bab everytime they call to inquire about the pre-ordered Volt. In all likelyhood, many Volt pre-order customers will have to wait months or even a full year before their car will finally be delivered to them. This is currently the case with some 2010 Chevrolet Equinox pre-orders.

To rub salt on the wounds of GM customers who have the most faith (most pre-order customers haven’t even seen the vehicle let alone drive it), dealers have the right to decide if they want to participate in the pre-order process. The implication of this is that the dealer who has earned 20 Volt allocations can actually opt to have all 20 Volts delivered and sitting on the lot for sale despite the fact that the Chevy store down the street has 6 orders pre-sold but has yet to earn the allocation to fill it.

Chevrolet General Sales Manager

I brought up the issue with Kurt McNeil, Chevrolet’s General Sales Manager and asked him to re-visit this approach. I suggested building pre-orders before unsold units but within allocation constraints. This would – at the very least – encourage dealers to sell units before they arrived – something that has huge implications for GM’s bottom line (as I wrote in my article here). Kurt indicated to me that this process would be difficult to change due to current State and Federal franchise laws. I’ll discuss Franchise Laws in a future article but for now, let me just state that most franchise laws are created to ensure (amongst other things) that a car manufacturer must treat all of its dealerships in a “fair and equitable manner.”

So if GM cannot better serve pre-order customers due to franchise laws, how come GM can legally roll-out the Volt in only three states? How is that “fair and equitable” to the remaining 47 states? Beats the hell out of me, but if that passes the “sniff test,” GM management should be able to get Legal off their asses and figure out a way to treat its most loyal and trusting customers properly and without breaking any laws.

GM Legal

For too long, GM’s legal department has been able to dictate to GM management that certain programs were impossible because of “this and that” and that was an accepted practice. It was taken “as is.” If I were Ed Whitacre, I’d just tell them to shut up and make it work. The quality of work coming out of GM’s legal department has a measurable effect on how the customer, you, and I are treated, and they have as much a mandate to stop doing things “the old way” as everyone else at GM.

So if you end up waiting six months for the Chevrolet Volt on which you put money down six months earlier yet your neighbor was able to have a shiny new Volt in his driveway immediately by simply dropping by a dealership, now you know why.

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When asked about the bow tie brand’s plans to meet initial demand for the vehicle, Campbell didn’t give a direct answer, saying “there are ways to manage [high demand]” and that Chevy “will prepare for those [instances].” What’s more, Mr. Campbell thinks the Volt will be a gateway product to other Chevrolet vehicles:

Its always a challenging (scenario) but what I think is the positive side of it is that the fact there is that much interest keeps the enthusiasm high for Chevrolet overall. I think that provides benefits to the Chevrolet brand and all of the other vehicles that people start to notice and get introduced to that maybe they weren’t even thinking about when they started their level of interest in this case the Chevy Volt.

When asked about the time frame for a national rollout of the hotly-anticipated PHEV, Mr. Campbell didn’t give a specific time frame but did say that the vehicle will eventually be available in all US markets. The Volt is currently set to launch in three initial markets including California, Michigan, and Washington D.C.

Read through the full interview right here.

General Motors’ plan to achieve this goal involves eliminating rebadged Daewoo models and instead focusing on more global Chevy vehicles like the Volt, Spark, Cruze, and Orlando – a move that will allow GM to realize great economies of scale.

Thoughts of (un)attainability aside, this seems like a noble goal for The General. Without such lofty objectives, there would be very little growth. As such, setting targets, regardless of attainability, is important and admirable because of the opportunity and incentive (committment to goals) for growth which they provide. While GM’s ability to meet this target remains to be seen, The GM Authority team supports these ambitious goals simply because easy targets is not what makes or breaks an automaker.

Lastly, many wonder about the possible effect this will have on GM’s other European brands. Is it possible that the increase in European Chevy sales will come at the expense of Opel/Vauxhall? General Motors counters that this will not be an issue because Opel shoppers do not cross-shop Chevrolets. To that, GM Authority would add “yet.”

For the sake of comparison, GM sold a total of 425,000 Chevrolets in Europe in 2009. This effectively means that The General wants to more than double Chevrolet volume in under six years.

Almost every automaker has ambitious sales goals for the next few years and without a big change in the current economic conditions, the likelihood of attaining these targets looks a lot less likely. That said we’re behind GM’s effort 100 percent.