This morning, TheWashington Post reports that the new novelty automobile from Government (formerly “General”) Motors will carry a price tag of $41,000 when it goes on sale in November. At that price, the Volt (or “ObamaVolt,” as some are calling it) is not likely to have mass appeal. George Magliano, an automotive industry forecaster, put it delicately when he opined that “I’m not sure the Volt is going to be a volume vehicle.”
Not a “volume vehicle,” eh? That’s PR-lingo for “bad news, Buster, you’ve got another Edsel on your hands.”
“Volume vehicle” is good, I admit. But it’s not nearly as good as this little gem: “The Chevrolet Volt will be the best vehicle in its class . . . because it’s in a class by itself.” That’s Joel Ewanick, vice president of U.S. marketing for GM. Good going, Joel! Take another chunk of that dough the Obama administration lifted out of the pockets of taxpayers so that GM could continue pretending to be a going concern. That shiny little tautology masquerading as a commendation you uttered is a classic. You bet the ObamaVolt is “in a class by itself!” “Johnny may be a moron, but he is the best in his class because he is the only one in his class.” Of course, no one would actually accuse Johnny of being a moron. Rather, he is “differently abled.” Likewise with the ObamaVolt.
Here’s one contribution I’d like to make to the debate over the future of the American car industry. For those companies that are subsidized by the government, criticism should be forbidden because it is environmentally reactionary. I’ll go further. Not only should criticism be forbidden, accurate performance statistics should be classified. If prospective car buyers compare the ObamaVolt to other cars, they are likely to pick the other cars. So anyone who cares about the planet and progressive thought will understand that, when it comes to the ObamaVolt, ignorance is bliss.
So what do you think: is the ObamaVolt a disaster waiting to happen? Not necessarily. Sure, it’s expensive and can only travel about 40 miles per battery charge. (It can putt another 340 miles on a gasoline powered generator, but wasn’t the whole point to eschew the evil-gasoline powered engine?) Thinking of passing that Beamer on the highway? Think again, Kemo Sabe. The ObamaVolt includes many patented SafetyPerformanceRetarding features (SPRFs) for the convenience of regulators. For example, its emisson-free engine delivers next to no horsepower so you won’t even be tempted to speed. Think how much you’ll save in tickets!
And consider these pluses:
1. The car will be available only in various shades of green (Bilious Green, Envy Green, Lettuce Green, Edamame Green etc.), thus declaring to the world that its owners are environmentally sensitive persons.
2. The radios are specially calibrated to substitute any station carrying Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or other unacceptable talk show hosts with a local NPR station, so no one who rides in an ObamaVolt need worry about second-hand pollution from racist, right-wing views.
3. Offsetting the high sticker price for what is really a glorified go-cart, the United States government, in addition to bailing out G.M., has extracted billions more from taxpayers like you and me in order to provide the suckers, er, proud buyers of the ObamaVolt with a $7,500 federal tax credit.
Snap Quiz: which of these three implausible pluses is actually true?
At press time, it is only number 3, but who knows? When he was on the hustings in 2008, Barack Obama pledged to put 1 million such vehicles on the road by 2015.
Now you might be saying that by 2015 the name “Barack Obama” is likely to be fading away like a bad dream. Perhaps. Hope springs eternal. But again, who knows? And it’s only 2010 now. He more than two years more to effect his transformation of the United States into a worker’s paradise à la Eastern Europe 1950. Wot larks!
What sort of mileage robber baron are you?
If you need to travel more than 40 miles one way, you’re just sending us all to an early environmental grave. 40 miles is a GIFT from Obama. He, in his infinite reconciliation, compromised with those miscreants suckling from the teat of obscene profits, instead of fully spreading the mileage around, so that you who idolize self-sufficiency and accountability can drive to your precious places of business.
Why, you should be walking, you, you, ADULTS!
(Besides, didn’t Pelosi already bless us with the GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition from Congressional Motors? Obama and the Dems give and give and it’s never good enough is it!?)
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P.S. I always enjoy your writing, Roger!
No-one will buy this clunker of a car; it will be the last gasp of GM before the car-making division is sold to China, an American inking the agreement with whatever dignity and faux-optimism he/she can muster.
I say “car-making division” because its core business is aged care. That core business will be taken over by the government, de jure and not merely de facto.
This is too funny. And yes, funny, surely because the time has passed for us in the west to be gloomy. The game is up, and best to be brave and cheerful. It’s like sitting in the first-class saloon of the Titanic as the boat yaws, drinking brandy and making light, amusing conversation.
One feature I almost never see discussed in electric cars, is something we take for granted in our gas driven buggies: heat.
What drives your heater and defroster when you you have no waste heat from the engine? An electric heater?? There goes your range down the tubes. An auxiliary fossil fuel heater? There goes your pollution savings.
Good luck driving one of these in North Dakota or Minnesota in the winter time.
That’s why these announcements come in California and Florida and during the summer time, so that no one will ask the embarrassing questions about how effective the heater/defroster is.
Volt was on the drawing board before anyone ever heard of Comrade O. Obama had no more to do with Volt than he did to stop the oil leak or the rising of the oceans.
What Volt really is is an experimental research vehicle. Leaf too. What they will do is put a ten thousand or more of these cars into production, and GM and Nissan will learn from designing, building, and servicing them what it is like to make these vehicles in the real world. Doing is the best way to learn. They can’t tell you that because it doesn’t fit the green script.
Yes all the enviro-baloney that accompanies the release is nauseating, but hey, it’s car advertising. What do you expect? Honesty?
You need to think of Volt as the Chrysler Turbine Car of our time. Just as the Turbine Car was emblematic of America’s view of the bright future ahead of us back then, Volt sums up the pessimistic view of the future most of us have now.
I believe that the electric car will eventually outperform the gas car in every way and someday car nuts will be drooling over the latest eFerraris & ePorsches that will have much higher performance than the current road rockets those companies sell. W are one good battery away from the electric car revolution. The heater is the second biggest problem, but a heat pump is 3 – 4 times more efficient than simple resistive heating right now, those numbers can be improved, and insulation could make up the rest. These are problems for engineers, not politicians, and if the Pols stay out of the way the engineers will solve them.
I am no environmentalist, but a hard core car guy who has been around cars long enough to have ridden in a new Edsel.
The only way to make electric cars work is to start building them, selling them, and working out the problems. There are enough Ed Begley Jrs out there to buy them in small quantities while they are more of a fashion statement than practical transportation. They can be the guniea pigs, I’ll drive my big gas powered Buick until it eCars are perfected.
It’s worth noting that the battery plant where the Volt’s batteries are being made is the one where Obama called out Pete Hoekstra for attending. Yeah, the same plant that just created 150 jobs at $500k a pop. So taxpayers are paying $500,000 per job to produce $10,000 batteries that will be installed in a car that nobody is going to buy. This is the new “green economy”, and a 3rd grader with an abacus can tell you that this is “unsustainable”. And this administration is shocked by the persistently high unemployment? “If you build it, he will come” is not a good economic policy.
“W[e] are one good battery away from the electric car revolution.”
Yup. But there’s a problem there: “one good battery” in that context does not exist and cannot exist. It isn’t an engineering problem. It’s a physics problem.
Search for, study, and learn from, something called the “electromotive series”. Each of the elements in that list has a number associated with it; to make a battery you pick two elements from the list, and the energy storage and production is proportional to the difference between the two numbers.
Then, and only then, can you start looking at the engineering challenges. For instance, if you pick two elements that are too far apart the reaction starts generating more heat than it does electricity — it’s started to be “fuel”. Some elements are dangerous as all Hell to handle — do you really want a hundred pounds or so of elemental sodium in a vehicle? Some elements are really rare — which is a drawback to what we’ve got already; to get enough lithium to replace, say, one percent of the cars on the road with electrics would require producing a hundred times more elemental lithium, with all the attendant Gaia-raping strip-mining operations and mining wastes, not to mention the fact that lithium is damn near as dangerous as sodium to handle.
It all comes down, in the end, to energy storage per pound and the simple fact that energetic chemical reactions exchange electrons instead of giving them up to cause an electric current. There ain’t no such animal as a “good battery” for cars, or for energy storage when “green” energy isn’t available, and there ain’t gonna be in this Universe, even in glorious happy Theory.
Regards,
Ric
“But there’s a problem there: “one good battery” in that context does not exist and cannot exist. It isn’t an engineering problem. It’s a physics problem.”
Actually I believe it will be a capacitor. Their characteristics are much better suited to vehicle use. There has also been less intensive development of capacitors than batteries to this point so there is more left to exploit.
I used the word battery because the average Joe uses that word for electricity storage device. This was a comment on a political blog post, not an engineering essay.
JFTR: The green power source I envision is the nuclear power plant.
Anyway, thanks for the negativity. Those who predict failure at the start and say I told you so as each problem is encountered have always been the ones who improved life for the rest of us. Where would the world be without guys like you?