The two mind-sets are showing up in General Motors’ and Nissan’s marketing choices: GM has chosen to label the Volt as “more car than electric.” Nissan says its car is “100 percent electric, zero-gas” in a commercial that shows a world burdened by its dependence on gas, complete with an office worker gloomily putting fuel into his Chevrolet Volt.
The Leaf passed the Volt last month in U.S. sales, as the Volt’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant shut down for four weeks of updates ahead of increased Volt production later this year. But both Nissan and GM believe their approaches will result in mass-market sales.
Nissan has said its Smyrna, Tenn., plant will be able to build 150,000 Leafs annually after production of the electric car starts there next year. GM has officially said its Detroit-Hamtramck plant will build 60,000 Volts next year, but CEO Dan Akerson has said he hopes GM eventually will build more than 100,000 a year.
At a recent industry green-car conference, Nissan’s North American director of advanced planning cheerfully touted the car as gas- and emissions-free — over and over and over.
“We are the greenest car — because we have no tailpipe and no gas, ever,” Nissan product planner Mark Perry said at last month’s Automotive News Green Car Conference. Customers who choose a Leaf over a Volt “bought the car because it has no gas.”
While GM executives have emphasized the Volt’s ability to give customers freedom from gas, they’re banking on taking the car to mass-market customers who want to have enough power for any length trip — not just the government-estimated 73 miles a Leaf can travel on one charge.
For instance, 57 percent of respondents in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll in May said they won’t ever buy an all-electric car — defined in the question as a car “you could only drive for a limited number of miles at one time”— no matter the price of gas.
So the Volt’s commercials talk about driving the car on road trips.
“For longer trips, it can use gas,” actor Tim Allen’s voice says in one ad, reassuring an electric socket that “you can do this. Any socket can.”
Many Americans need reassurance, Volt marketing director Cristi Landy said, and many get it from driving one of the Volt demo models being shipped this year to every Chevy dealer who plans to sell Volts.
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