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Honda Isn’t Getting a Charge Out of GM’s Device

Rejected submission by fliptop at 2025-02-03 17:23:31 from the no-one's-buying-it dept.
Business

Battery-powered devices are quick – but they are hard to move off of dealership lots. The “Honda” Prologue, for instance. It’s selling like crushed grasshopper burgers at a barbecue joint. The hope [reuters.com] had been to sell 70,000 of these devices annually. This hope was predicated on an assumption that – like the “safe and effective” whatever was in those syringes – the truth about devices would not get out about devices [ericpetersautos.com]:

It has.

Awareness has percolated – about the hassles that attend owning a device as well as the catastrophically rapid and huge depreciation in the value of a device, which is on average 30 percent higher than that of a typical vehicle. Even people who like devices are becoming – what’s the right word? – hesitant about buying devices.

As a result, Honda has only sold about a third as many devices – about 33,000 – as it had hoped. Although it has produced about 45,000 of these devices so far. That means around 12,000 devices are not moving.

[...] Monthly sales have been trending downward since the “peak” of 5,410 devices back in August of 2024. What happened in November has not helped at all – and that is good, if one prefers that the market rather than the government decides what ought to be manufactured.

[...] Well, the announcement has just been made that production of the Honda-looking device will be reduced – in order to avoid the problem of dealers being stuck with too many devices they can’t sell. “In early 2025, we changed the plant’s production schedule to increase efficiency following the decision by Honda to reduce Prologue volumes, and an adjustment in the mix of production of GM vehicles at the site,” reads a statement [yahoo.com] issued by General Motors the other day. One of the three shifts has been ended.

“The company is working with impacted employees and stakeholders to ensure an orderly transition.” In plain language, about 800 workers who’d been assembling devices at the Ramos Arizpe plant are no longer working. They have “transitioned” to the unemployment line.

Related: General Motors Lays Off Hundreds Of US Workers [soylentnews.org]


Original Submission