After months of bad news, GM finally has a reason to be optimistic about its Chevrolet Volt. It delivered 2,289 Volts last month, the most it’s sold in a month since the vehicle became available a little over a year ago. March sales were more than double what they were in February, and close to the rate needed for GM to accommodate its previously stated production goal of 30,000 cars, though not the higher figure of 45,000 it had once targeted.

So, what can be made of these sales figures? 

It should be kept in mind that the increase in sales could be temporary. As we predicted in earlier posts, buyers had some good reasons to put off buying the Volt until March, since at that point it would qualify for special rebates and other benefits in California, and the cars would come with a safer battery pack design. So March sales figures may have been inflated by sales that would otherwise have happened earlier this year.

Many people have been keeping an eye on the Volt to get a sense of whether electric vehicles will succeed this time around, or whether they will fade away as they have in the past. The first electric vehicles were introduced a century ago, but they lost out to gas-powered cars. About a decade ago, they failed again—that’s when GM spent a billion dollars developing the EV-1 only to stop producing it a few years after it was introduced.

Now every major automaker has announced plans for electric vehicles, in large part to meet tough fuel economy regulations. But it’s not clear whether consumers will go for electric vehicles, which are often twice as expensive as comparably sized gas-powered cars because of their costly batteries; or whether automakers will need to meet their fuel economy goals with other technologies.   

Here is some more grist for the mill. Nissan also released sales figures for its electric Leaf today. It only sold 579 in March, for a total of 1,733 this year. Toyota, meanwhile, posted record sales of the Prius today: it sold 28,711 of the cars, a figure that includes the new Prius v and Prius c variants. The Prius c sells for about $19,000 and gets 50 miles per gallon. The Volt sells for roughly twice that (although a tax rebate brings the cost to $32,000).

Do the sales of the Volt indicate anything about the broader question of whether electric vehicles will succeed? I’m interested in your thoughts.

A Volt outside GM's headquarters in Detroit. Credit: Flickr / Landlessness.

Electric vehicle enthusiasts (and critics) are keeping a close eye on sales of GM’s Volt this year to get a sense of whether electric vehicles will really finally catch on. GM has said that it hopes to sell 30,000 Volts in 2012, which would mean selling, on average 2,500 a month. It’s far short of that pace for January having sold just 603.

The January figure markedly down from December, when GM delivered 1,520. But sales were actually up substantially from the same time last year, when GM sold 321 of the cars—however, at that time, the Volt was only available in a few states. 

GM didn’t meet its goal of selling 10,000 Volts during 2011, for a number of reasons. In fact, it’s still short of 10,000, with total deliveries of 8,600 vehicles since sales began at the end of 2010.

So, do slow sales in January mean GM won't reach its goal?

There are a number of factors that could explain the slow January sales. Customers hoping to get the Federal tax credit for the car for the 2011 tax year may have rushed to buy in December. Also, at the beginning of January, GM announced a retrofit that will make the car safer. The cars on the lots in January (about 4,400 were there at the beginning of the month) were not retrofitted yet, and the parts needed to do the retrofits weren't widely available. So anyone buying a car in January would have to take it back in a month or two to have the changes made. GM also announced in January that cars built later this year would have low enough emissions to qualify for driving in California’s HOV lanes, an attractive perk.

All in all, potential customers had a lot of reasons to wait until later this year to buy a Volt. It’s too early to call whether the company could sell 30,000 this year. It’s also too early to say how important sales of the Volt are, at least in terms of the overall prospects for electric vehicles. But I’d be interested to hear what readers think. How much is riding on the success of the Volt this year?