Barack Motors, aka General Motors, has suspended production of the Chevy Volt for six weeks to pare excess inventory. They are using the the downtime to prep the assembly line for building the 2014 Chevrolet Impala starting early next year. Sales for the Volt are down 2.7% YTD. It has shown three consecutive months of decrease compared to LY, ending with the largest decrease in October 2013 of 32% compared to October 2012.

Lesson to learn here is that there is an insufficient market for this product, despite all the good intentions of the Obama administration and the environmentalists. And, that the government can not make a market. The people by their choices makes a market for a product. And this is a product that GM loses money on with every unit it sells.

What’s most amusing is how the greenies report this. For example UPDATE:Plug-In Electric Car Sales For Oct: Volt, Leaf Hold Steady by John Voelcker. His take on the Volt is quite different. You decide whether it is deliberately deceptive or he is mis-informed, when he says . . .

The Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car racked up 2,022 deliveries, which is up 14 percent on September’s number of 1,766. For the 10 months of the year to date, a total of 18,782 Volts has now been delivered–which is 2.7 percent less than last year’s total through October of 19,309.

It “racked up” 2,022 sales. That’s down from October 2012 when it “racked up” 2971 sales. A 32% drop. You’ll also find reporting that supposedly refutes the over-inventory and poor sales performance as contributing to the production suspension. The reason I say “supposedly refutes” the real reason for the suspension is because the slug for the article itself reads to the contrary; http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/08/gm-suspends-chevy-volt-production-over-slow-sales/1#.UnSQGRaYcUt Do you see the “over slow sales?”

Suffice it to say, if the Volt was doing well, they wouldn’t be needing subsidies to sell it, they wouldn’t be losing money on every one they sell, and, they wouldn’t be suspending production. And the taxpayers wouldn’t have lost $9.7 Billion on the GM bailout.