Chevy Volt Barely Matches MPG of Electric Car Built In...1896

GM CEO Dan Akerson on the Chevy Volt:

"not a step forward, but a leap forward"

Really? I beg to differ. How about "an overpriced taxpayer subsidised lesser version of a car built 115 years ago?"

Uh-huh.

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt.

Its present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

Imagine how much attention that would attract in the showroom! Congressman/Chevy dealer Mike Kelly (R-PA) no doubt would love to have one:

I’m a Chevrolet dealer… we have a Chevy Volt on the lot, it’s been there now for four weeks. We’ve had one person come in to look at it, just to see what it actually looks like… Here’s a car that costs $45,763. I can stock that car for probably a year and then have to sell it at some ridiculous price.

When you look at this, it makes absolutely no sense. I can stock a Chevy Cruze, which is about a $17,500 car and turns every 30 to 40 days out of inventory… or I can have a Volt, which never turns and creates nothing for me on the lot except interest costs… So a lot of these things that we’re seeing going on have a tremendous economic impact on people who are being asked to stock them and sell them. There is no market for this car.

Ironically, who should agree with this 1 percenter, this greedy corporate businessman, this Republican, but...a group of Berkeley professors:

Even lefty profs at Berkeley could see that the Volt was a horrible investment. Berkeley physicist Leon J. Schipper, for one, was not enamored of the Volt.

Analyzing the Chevy Volt, the new sedan that is supposed to go 40 miles on batteries and then use a gasoline engine, he calculated that because of inefficiencies in electricity generation, its fuel economy was no better than a Toyota Prius hybrid running on gasoline, while its price was roughly double that of the Prius.

"Does the extra $20,000 justify the overall fuel and possible carbon dioxide savings?" he asked.

Or, for even less money, they can buy the all-gasoline Chevy Cruze, which gets 42 MPG...or, if your morality refuses to allow you to feed more cash into bailout recipients, you can opt for the Ford Focus (below) and its range of 40 MPG...

Finally - some truth and irony. First,let's take a look back to September 5th of this year, when the New York Times actually said something that was accidental honest (same Daily Caller link as on top):

“For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”


Correct! For Barack Obama - the man who speaks of "boilers" and works to create a future reminiscent of America circa 1939 - and for GM, who's work practices and design philosophy haven't changed since the 1950's - this does represent the best they can offer as a vision of the future. The best vision that can be created with federal dollars: An financially inefficient version of a technology already developed two centuries ago.

And here's the irony - Dan Akerson. choosing to lead an automotive parade not in his precious Volt, but in a ...1960 Chevy Camero:

What's the matter, bitch?  Afraid you wouldn't make it down Woodward Avenue alive?