shotel said: I'm trying to understand what GM's strategy is. If It's not a secret that the 2018 Bolt will be limited and the 2019 may be a better value, Won't consumers just wait for the potentially better 2019 model? Wouldn't this hurt/slow sales during Q1/Q2? Ostensibly losing ZEV credits? If the ZEV credits are a primary driver for production schedules, then aren't GM EV's still compliance cars? At what point do ZEV credits and tax incentives no longer matter, and EV's stand on their own as profitable lines in GM's portfolio? Click to expand...

This is the $64000 question, is it not?I have read the 2017 ZEV credits for every Bolt sold in a CARB state amount to $13,500 cash value. This directly goes to GM's bottom line by reducing the number of credits they need to buy.I have also heard a comparable figure for the amount they pay to LG Chem per car for the batteries.If you hear that...do you think they are losing money at $40k MSRP per Bolt? Probably not, although they are not paying off their engineering and tooling costs either on the 25k units sold in 2017.Is it a compliance car? Technically, compliance cars are ONLY sold in CARB states, and the Bolt is available nationwide and in Canada. I would LOVE to see sales figures however, for the fraction sold outside the 10 CARB states, and the discounts below MSRP applied in and out of CARB states.Why would GM lose $13k by selling outside of a CARB state (or in Canada)?....one speculation would be that they anticipate that the value of ZEV credits and the cost of batteries are both falling to a negligible level in a few years. And they want to have some grassroots buzz and experienced dealers/mechanics in non-CARB states so they can ramp up faster later when/if they want to. The Canadian Bolts are also providing some great cold-weather data for GM engineering....I suspect that on board engineering data gets sent to GM through OnStar. (Nissan did/does this on the LEAF).So, the decision to build only 25k Bolts in the 2017 MY is pretty conservative....I think the risk they didn't sell was low, and the 25k are enough that spread around (not all in California) they get some weather-related engineering data and enough numbers (in California) to isolate weird defects. 25k is a good number of beta testers I think before scale up.But that scale up will be a varied product line, so GM can do what they do so well...make and sell whatever is popular du jour, and all of which will rely (and amortize) a common Bolt drivetrain engineering/testing cost. And I expect they will drive a hard bargain with LG Chem as the scale increases.