[King T]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

Odd, I find electric cars boring. Take battery, add motor, drive wheels. Its not that complicated. On the other hand, integrating substantial electric range and a gasoline engine so that you can use each powersource to its maximum benefit? That is very impressive. Especially when you consider how well they pulled the system off. Its a wonderful technological achievement within the automotive industry. But GM seems insistent on calling the Volt & ELR 'electric vehicles', despite the fact that they aren't EVs: they're a cross between an EV and a gas powered car, which everyone (besides GM) would makes it a hybrid a hybrid. And so since they're EVs, they get treated like EVs by the public, and then get criticized for their poor electric range

I totally agree. I don't know why GM kept on advertising/stating the ELR as a EV at the beginning. Even they had to come back and say it wasn't.

GM admits Cadillac ELR no real competition for Tesla Model S

Last year, then-CEO of General Motors, Dan Akerson, made it clear that the company lookouts at the Ren Cen had California automaker Tesla in their sights. "If you want to compete head-to-head with Tesla, and we ultimately will, you want to do it with a Cadillac," he said.

So, given the fact that the Cadillac ELR has a plug and sells for roughly the same price at the Tesla Model S ($75,000 vs $69,900, before incentives) and that Cadillac doesn't have any other electric vehicle on the horizon, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the way that Akerson wanted to challenge Tesla's EV success was with the ELR. Well, you'd apparently be wrong.

Speaking yesterday in Detroit, GM's head of global product development, Mark Reuss, admitted that the ELR is not the Tesla competitor that Akerson promised. "People like to say the ELR is [competition for the Model S], but it's really not. It's a different car, it's a different price point. It's way-different technology." So, if we follow that logic to conclusion with Akerson's quote from last year, then the only way that Cadillac can eventually compete with Tesla is with a pure electric car, and that seems an outside chance, at best, for the foreseeable future.

Through the end of July, Cadillac has sold 578 ELRs since it went on sale earlier this year. Tesla doesn't break out monthly US sales, but has sold 15,114 Model S EVs around the world in the first six months of 2014.

For his part, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has already said that GM is headed down the wrong path with plug-in hybrids like the ELR or the Chevy Volt. Speaking about the Volt last year, Musk said, Chevy "sort of created something that's a bit of amphibian," which resulted in a car that's, "Okay but not great."

I never looked at the ELR as a Tesla competitor. I thought any Tesla competitor would have to be full EV like the S to be directly compared.

I did want the ELR to be more like the BMW i8







The ELR looks great to me, just wish it was more performance oriented.

I do think the price drop is where the ELR should have been in the first place. It should help move more ELR's. 1,310 ELR were sold in 2014