The Cart Leading The Horse

How often do you hear of a business manufacturing a product that it has no market for?  Not often, right?  And what happens to those companies when they go down that road?  Remember Flooz?  Neither does anyone else.  How about the Apple Lisa?  Great idea.  But who wants to sell their house in order to afford a computer?

Well, to me, until General Motors figures out that its target customer is not the Birkenstock-clad environmentalist dot.com wunderkind (a demographic that constitutes all of twelve people) but Joe Six Pack (98 million), it will continue in its financial slopfest.  Government bailout or no.

When do you suppose the geniuses there are going to get off this kick?

Consumer Reports: GM's Volt 'doesn't really make a lot of sense'
David Shepardson / Detroit News Washington Bureau

Washington — Consumer Reports offered a harsh initial review of the Chevrolet Volt, questioning whether General Motors Co.'s flagship vehicle makes economic "sense."The extended-range plug-in electric vehicle is on the cover of the April issue — the influential magazine's annual survey of vehicles — but the GM vehicle comes in for criticism.

"When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn't particularly efficient as an electric vehicle and it's not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy," said David Champion, the senior director of Consumer Reports auto testing center at a meeting with reporters here. "This is going to be a tough sell to the average consumer." [link]

Chevy. "The average consumer." There was a time when those two concepts were legitimately used in the same sentence. But not any more. Now Chevy markets its wares to "the socially conscious" (a group whose members would never be caught dead driving a Chevy in the first place). To seal its fate, GM markets a product - its "flagship vehicle" no less - that is expensive, inefficient, annoying, and "doesn't really make a lot of sense."

Own GM stock?