For some of these older unsold Ultium products I wonder if GM would not be better off either scraping them or selling them commercially without a warranty.
Virgnia passed a law last year requiring manufactures to reimburse at the retail rates for warranty work. I am sure somehow that the actual reimbursement rate is reimbusement less than retail but I would be shocked if Acura has not paid out more in warranty claims than I paid for my two ZDXs. And more likely they have already paid several times my total lease payments for all the warranty work. And I still have a total of 36 months of time between the two cars, all of course covered under warranty.
I do not know how they are accounting for the warranty liability but I have a hard time believing that if they used real life numbers it would make sense to sell these vehicles to retail conductors.
Not an issue. Multiple Issues. Obviously I am unlucky but talking to people at the dealership (I know my service advisor well at this point) this is not a unicorn. Many of these ZDXs spend significant time in the shop for real repairs.
Vehicle 1 - before tax one pay = about $6K for 24 months
HVAC stopped working. They did a bunch of diagnostic work, were not sure why so replaced the blower and multiplex control unit. That didn’t help. Somehow they decided they needed to replace the wiring harness, which required taking the car kind of apart and having it in the shop for 45 days. Once they did that they ended up replacing the Body Control Module since for some reason the keys were not working. Then keys were still not working so they replaced the keys. Then the keys were still not working so they replaced BCM again.
Then the TPMS system stopped working on two tires so they had to replace those.
Work order listed total bill for this at $1,164 for parts and labor. But that cant be right. Minimum of 10 hours of labor plus all the parts listed above aren’t worth $1,164. The dealership would never agree to do the work for that price.
Vehicle 2 - payments before tax are about $12 for 36 months.
Forward camera failed which knocked super cruise and forward collision warning offline. Required replacement of the forward camera and imaging processing module. Took 18 days and this has a listed price of $7011.2.
This car is back in shop now for a high voltage electric system warning which also, incidentally, took the HVAC offline. Seems to be a common problem with a few possible fixes one simple and software based and one hardware based. The service advisor has told me the fix for me is not software based. This will be at a minimum another several thousand dollars.
I will have to look- for that price I would take my chances if it could actually go through. Failed with my attempts with any MI dealers to negotiate through email before the the 2025 deadline expired….”you have to come into the showroom!”
Well I mean many of us are not in Canada but this is what happens when you play games. I think the NADA and the OEMs have had it good for a long time. Competition is supposed to be a good thing, and instead we are complaining. Farley has said I think before he drove a BYD and was impressed. Plus the OEMs pulled back their electrification plans, when they really shouldn’t for the sake of being relevant long term.
I like how this article fails to mention Biden finalized the 100% tariff on Chinese EVs before he left office(along with varying high tariffs on solar panels, semiconductors, lfp batteries, etc). “Trump letting them in” has one big caveat…they have to build vehicles in the US(which is the entire premise of tariffs).
Zeeker had a big booth at CES this year. They are planning to build vehicles in South Carolina, to bypass the tariffs. Problem I see is all the tariffs on the parts and raw materials to build said EVs. They won’t just be able to import everything from China and assemble vehicles here, without incurring heavy tariffs.
Looks like approximately 350s±ish/mo with 0 down. Unless I’m missing some huge trunk money, not sure that I agree with those being “bonkers” numbers for an econobox.
If I’m not mistaken, Farley wasn’t just impressed, I think he drove that BYD for a longer-term? This is all just short-sightedness on the part of the American automakers. The world is going to EVs, and America will follow, we’re just still in fairly early days relatively speaking (and the use case isn’t quite there for a good deal of the country), and the big guys will continue to rake in as much margin as they can on overpriced, oversized ICE behemoths for as long as they can, until the EV market settles and people start catching on that moving energy is far cheaper and more efficient than generating it. I guarantee they’ll be in front of the American taxpayers eventually, hat-in-hand, claiming they need money or the ripple effects to suppliers will cause major economic damage. Just watch.
I hope I’m wrong, and that Ford and others continue their “skunkworks” type endeavors so that when Americans are finally ready to buy, the so-called “big three” will have something ready.
Hmm it seems that something must have changed when I ran the numbers…but here is an example with educator, lease cash and $500 GMCard sign up. Maybe with more dealer discount, it seems 26s are the better target than 25s.
Just a bit misleading. The article states in it that its only if the Chinese build and manufacture the cars here. Well if they do that, they won’t be a bargain!
On one condition, of course: These companies are welcome as long as they build a plant in America and hire Americans to work the factory floor.
“If they want to come in and build a plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that’s great, I love that,” Trump said during remarks at a Jan. 13 meeting of the Detroit Economic Club. “Let China come in, let Japan come in.”
Notably, Chinese car companies have been eyeing the U.S. for ages—after all, we have the world’s second-largest car market after China itself. Some of the firms were in attendance at CES in Las Vegas last week, apparently testing the waters for their products.
3+ years taking electric F150s into southern VT, never had a problem leaving them for a few nights. My RAM 1500?? Double 12V battery failure, the first time I left it more than 48 hours. I was moving back to ICE for winter reliability but maybe not!! At least I unlocked the secret ice cube tray feature-
Hmm,
My TESLA 2025 Y Performance 2200 miles, offer price went up…just checked today
CARVANA: $41,000
Edit: CARMAX $37,000
That’s $2100 above what my loan was when I bought last March, used Tesla Credits for the down payments etc. so no out of pocket $$ was exchanged… Maybe time to SELL
