cts | Volt a Day | GM Sets Charger Price October 06, 2010

During our dinner on the Detroit trip one of the executives discussed the chargers. He said that it was important for GM to have a supply of the chargers to sell with the cars, so that they didn't get caught in a situation where they couldn't sell a car because there wasn't a charger to go with it.

I'm glad someone else is thinking about these things, because I am not sure that would have occurred to me until I was standing on the car lot unable to sell a car because there weren't chargers on hand.

They said this is an example of how difficult it is to be on the edge of a new technology. (We'll argue later about how new the technology is and whether GM could have been better positioned and whether they couldn't have maybe been the leader of this technology if they had simply kept the EV1 on the road until they had each died and continued development from that point.)

There are three companies that make these chargers. They each told GM a price. GM (which, the executive pointed out, is no stranger to a manufacturing process) took a charger apart and estimated what it would cost to build it. The companies were all very close to one another in price and all consistently charging three times what the charger should cost.

Ah, punish the early adopter.

They have now announced the price and supplier for the chargers. It is already considerably cheaper than other chargers (the only hard number I could find for the Nissan Leaf charger was $1,200, which couldn't be correct).

My guess is that after the initial year of deliveries GM will start building their own chargers and they will undercut the current supplier. I don't believe in punishing the early adopter, but I like to see the price gouger punished.