General Motors has plenty of good reasons for its decision to slash $5,000 off the sticker price of its hybrid Chevrolet Volt, a model that analysts say already sells for a loss.
The company needs the model to stay competitive with the Nissan (NSANY) Leaf and Toyota (TM) Prius. It has found some ways to build Volts more cheaply in roughly four years of production. It wants to help save the world.
But one reason trumps those all: Chevy is slashing Volt prices because it has been selling a ton of pickups and wants to keep doing so. That probably makes no sense to most car buyers, but the seemingly separate models are linked in the minds of federal regulators and, correspondingly, GM executives.
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