I don’t know which used car I should buy

 

Saab fans all over the world are looking anxiously at a company that says it’s pulled itself back from the brink of death. Again.

The latest rescuer is the little-known Chinese carmaker Hawtai Motor Group, which will invest 120 million euros ($177 million) in Spyker Cars NV, the Dutch company that owns the Swedish brand.

For its $177 million, Hawtai will be able to purchase up to 29.9 percent of Spyker. That means that the entire company is valued at $530 million.

In contrast, startup electric-car maker Tesla Motors [NSDQ: TSLA] has a market capitalization of $2.5 billion, after its successful initial public offering last June.

Tesla has built barely 1,700 cars, and will produce no cars at all during a substantial part of next year as it works toward volume production of its all-electric 2012 Tesla Model S luxury sports sedan.

Hawtai was founded just 11 years ago, in 2000. Like many small Chinese vehicle manufacturers, it builds a variety of products: cars, sport-utility vehicles, buses, and engines.

It sold a total of 81,500 vehicles last year, according to data from the China Association of Auto Manufacturers.

That’s a 60-percent rise from its 2009 sales, exceeding the growth rate in the booming Chinese market substantially.

More relevant, it’s also more than twice the 31,696 cars sold by Saab–globally–last year.

Saab’s sales in the U.S., historically its largest single market, have plummeted to a rate of less than 10,000 per year.

Worse yet, its newest model, the luxurious midsize 2011 Saab 9-5 sports sedan, is selling so slowly in the U.S. that it’s being outsold even by the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric cars.

Saab showed an all-electric 9-3 ePower SportCombi wagon at last fall’s Paris Motor Show, and has plans to roll out a test fleet of 70 such cars to gather data on electric operation.

For the moment, though, survival comes first.

This post originally appeared at Green Car Reports.

General Motors will deploy more Volt electric vehicles as demonstration models in a move to drum up publicity for the car — though it will further limit an already strained supply amid voracious demand for electric cars.

That means electric car buyers, who have so far provided tremendous demand for electric cars that has not been met, will face even more delays before they finally find themselves behind the wheel of an electric car. Most of the companies — and the U.S. government — have set very ambitious targets for electric car sales but have not been able to supply enough cars to every person interested in buying them. General Motors plans to use the demo vehicles to drum up publicity for the Volt — though the company might not need it in the short-term.

The price tags for electric cars haven’t been an issue either, because electric car buyers usually have higher incomes. Leaf owners are in the top 15 percent of households with regards to income, according to Nissan. Both Nissan and General Motors are trying to produce electric cars with broader appeal by slapping smaller price tags on them, but it’s resulted in demand that the car manufacturers just can’t keep up with.

Nissan, which manufactures the electric plug-in Leaf, also regularly faces hurdles in bringing the car over to the U.S. The company said it is on track to deliver 20,000 Nissan Leaf cars to people who have reserved them by September. So far, Nissan has only delivered around 500 Leafs to the United States. General Motors has also shipped around 1,500 Volt cars since the vehicle went on sale last year. GM expects to sell between 400 and 500 Volt cars in April, down from 608 in March.

The Chevy Volt basically has a traditional internal combustion engine and an engine powered by a batter jammed into the same vehicle. The car can run around 35 miles off battery power before the internal combustion engine kicks in, giving the car a total range north of 300 miles on a full charge and full tank of gas. It’s one of the cheaper electric cars on the market. The volt retails for around $40,000, compared to the super high-class Tesla Roadster that retails for more than $100,000.

The U.S. government has been very optimistic about the Volt’s potential — indicating that General Motors would sell more than 500,000 Volt vehicles by 2015. Those sales figures came from the government’s goal of having more than 1 million electric cars — that are plug-in hybrids or pure electric cars — on the road by 2015. The Nissan Leaf, an plug-in electric car that has a range of around 100 miles, will be the second best-selling car with 300,000 units sold by 2015, according to the report.

[Photo: OcaNieba]

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