GM announces UK Volt price

Suspicion and negativity inevitably accompany the shock of the new. That's why Vauxhall has embarked on the marketing push for its Ampera PHEV a full year up front, including revealing the price

GM's British brand, Vauxhall, has announced the release price of its Ampera -- aka Volt -- plug-in hybrid a year or more ahead of its scheduled launch in early 2012.

The car will go to market for £28,995 (AU$44,980 at the time of writing). That figure includes the UK government's Plug-in Car Grant of £5,000 -- which means the actual price of the car is £33,990.

The reasoning behind the release of the price so far ahead of time is to allay sticker shock among prospective early adopters, giving Vauxhall time to explain what's behind it and lay out the running-cost benefits to counter the up-front whack.

Unfamiliar and costly new technologies like the Volt/Ampera need a long marketing run-up. For the Ampera, Vauxhall is offering a no-commitment opportunity to join the ranks of 'ePioneers', who, for a £150 deposit, can reserve an up-front spot in the buyer queue and gain 'access to exclusive events and opportunities'.

GM is also putting it out everywhere how cheap the car will be to run. The battery charges from the standard mains in about four hours, giving an all-electric range of up to 80 km for as little as £1 (about $1.50) on some household energy plans. All of which sounds great. But here's a sample of the kind of press they're up against, care of carsuk.co.uk...

[Whether] you pick the subsidised price or the actual price, [that's] an awful lot of money. Yes, you can plug the Ampera in to the mains and get enough juice -- if you leave it there for four hours -- to travel for fifty miles (although the EPA in the US says the range is actually just 35 miles). And that fifty miles will only cost you a bit over £1. Cheap motoring by any measure.

The trouble is, the bulk of that cheap motoring is because electricity isn't being taxed in the same way as petrol and diesel. If it were, the savings wouldn't be as dramatic. But for savings like that buyers will probably put up with the fifty mile electric-only range and the four hour top-up time.

But it will take a huge mileage to even start to make a dent in the purchase price. Even though the range-extender is by far the most practical of the hybrid solutions it is still a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Take away the 35-50 miles of EV ability and the rest of the time you'll get 44 mpg (6.4L/100 km).

For half the money of an Ampera you could buy a 1.6 diesel Focus with similar performance but which does 62mpg and has a range of twice that of the Ampera. If you did just 35 miles a day in the Focus it would cost you £3 a day instead of a £1 in the Ampera. The difference in list price of the Ampera and Focus is £16,000. So it would take 8000 days to recover the extra cost of the Ampera.

That's 22 years.

As the site implicitly points out, buyers need to take considerable care in assessing the verity of manufacturer claims about range and charge times and running costs, particularly when they includes phrases like "up to" and "as little as".

Probably more so in Australia than in Britain, given the predicted exponential energy price rises here and the British government's gearing of it tax regimen to strongly favour the uptake of low- and zero-emissions vehicles. There's zero excise duty on purchase, company car taxation is capped at five per cent, they're exempt from London's congestion charge and once they're in there they have parking privileges.

The car also favours the predominant use of the car for journeys of less than the 80km all-electric range, which knocks much of country Australia off the beneficiary list immediately.

That said, with the load on the 1.4-litre petrol four largely restricted to a generator rather than an entire car, it will doubtless prove frugal as well. And, of course, we have a fair way to go to catch up with the UK on fuel prices.

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