Quote:
Originally Posted by Red2014SS
That's the contradiction. You said, "Cars like the Hellcat are not high volume, but they can exist as long as they sell well"? Well, the more they sell, the more it impacts the fleet average fuel economy. Popularity will kill them. Yet, if they don't sell many, their is no incentive to produce them. The solution? Well, for Chevrolet, it's the 4 cylinder Camaro.
Super Chevy just wrote an article praising the 4-cyl turbo Camaro. Why? That 4-cyl engine, if it sells well, will allow GM to continue producing the V8 ... at least for a little while.
Taken from this months Super Chevy magazine -
"Every car sold figures into the average for the manufacturer. The way the law works, is that all vehicles produced by the auto maker have their EPA mileage numbers averaged into a single number by a complex mathematical formula. That number must meet or exceed a federally set CAFE standard. If the company's CAFE is less than average, they are forced to pay a hefty fine to the tune of $5.50 per .1 mpg" ..
That's for EVERY vehicle they sell. It doesn't matter how well the Hellcat sells. They need to lower MPG for the entire fleet to make the cut on these new standards. If a manufacturer fails to meet the standard, for every .1 mpg under, per 1 million cars - the fine is $5.5 million dollars! They miss by 1 mpg, it's $55 million! In the big picture, cars like the Hellcat are fun, but they are small potatoes. Fiat/Chrysler makes their money selling pickup trucks and econo boxes. If one or the other has to disappear, say goodbye to the Hellcat engine.
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The flip side of that is small volume cars don't shift the average very much. The calculation formula is intended to weight big sellers more heavily than niche products. And a vehicles footprint factors into the target that it needs to meet. So something like a Hellcat doesn't actually hurt them all that much. Now, the R/T Chargers & Challengers that get only slightly better mileage than the Hellcats yet sell in substantially higher numbers ... those might be a point of concern for FCA.
But an even bigger concern for them should be the poor sales of the Dart. Strong sales of efficient cars like that make it easier to do gas guzzling V8s. GM does fairly well in the compact & subcompact segments, as does Ford. But FCA has been struggling with the Dart, for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of. And the 500 isn't doing that great either. At the moment, they're probably relying on diesel half ton Rams to pull their average up ... which just feels
odd.