Chevy Volt Sales Trump Nissan LEAF in November 2011

Does anyone know why US Leaf sales have fallen for the last two months? Was there a supply crunch? Were the cars shipped to other countries instead? I find it hard to believe that Nissan has saturated all of the pent-up demand already with only 8,720 units. And if they have, they need to expand availability to nationwide already!

@darelldd - since you're picking on that line....
I find it hard to believe that many (if any at all) of these cars have NEVER used grid-supplied electricity. Eric never said it was exclusively grid-supplied. For example, if you have solar, you would either need to only charge during the day or have another set of batteries. One with a net-metered solar array would still use "grid-supplied electricity" to charge at night. They would just "replenish" the grid during the day to compensate ;-)

Well - apparently # of selling days was 25 last month. So,

Current Volt inventory : 4,240 (93 days)
Leaf : 616 (23 days)

EVNow,
Thank you very much for cars.com inventory info!
That is very valuable info!

Up to now hybrids inventory are also very limited: Prius - 12,580 only; Toyota Prius v - 2631; Toyota Camry Hybrid - 580 only; Lexus CT - 1,266 only; Honda Insight - 1,332 only; Hyundai Sonata Hybrid - 1,145 only.

"As for pre-sold - they are actually pre-ordered, so won't be excluded" That's right, it would be good to combine this data with the % of pre-orders getting converted to sales, and exclude that number.

I am supposed to get my leaf next week but Nissan phoned me to say that my dealer failed the Leaf certification process and they can't sell me the car through them. They also said that they have been trying for days to find another Nissan dealer willing to sell me the car but have not found any. So there is a car sitting in an US port, it cleared customs and is ready but Nissan can't find a dealer willing to take my money. No wonder sales are down with such an strange inefficient process.

"General Motors CEO Dan Akerson says the automaker may redesign the battery cell of its Volt."
http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/12/01/gm-ceosays-volt-battery-may-be-r...

I wonder what effect this will have on Volt sales in the coming months?

So GM VP Mary Barra said it was not a cell level problem with the Volt but a stack level issue. That would be consistant with the coolant testing that was done on a Plugincars.com thread a few days ago. The coolant was found to be not conductive enough to short a cell but was conductive enough to short the stack, given exposure to conductors or circuit boards by the coolant being dumped on the system during a rollover. The same testing on that thread showed that if the coolant were heated it would produce the kind of smoke that was seen in the federal crash test/rollovers. The smoke appeared first and then a fire later.

I am not saying this was the cause, but it is consistent with it, given a coolant leak from the crash. That same thread identified 2 non-conductive coolants that might fix the problem. There may be other things GM wants to do, however. Like insulate or seal certain things, depending on where the conductors were exposed.

"Does this remind anybody of the Prius brake non-issue?"

Yes, it does. There are trillions of oil money against electric vehicles so there are going to be lots of attacks against EVs - they will use any occasion or non-issue.

Toyota plans to sell 15,000 a year of plug-in Prius, starting in 2012.

http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111205/OEM06/312059...