It won nearly every serious automotive award and had a huge carbon-free footprint of positive reviews from critics and consumers alike. So if that's the case, why is the Volt GM's slowest selling product? More than that, why does there seem to be such a negative charge to the car? People across the country who have never even seen a Volt let alone driven this engineering marvel have nothing good to say about it, confounding both auto analysts and company executives. – YouTube
Dominant Social Theme: The Volt is just swell.
Free-Market Analysis: We've written a number of articles about the floundering Chevy Volt – and electric cars in general. This Autoline "round table" discussion of the Volt in particular – presented in the video below – puts the Volt into a larger perspective.
The discussion, which took place several months ago, was held on "Autoline This Week," hosted by John McElroy – joined by Joe White of the Wall Street Journal, Manny Lopez from the Michigan Capitol Confidential and Gary Witzenburg, a former engineer on GM's original electric project, the EV1.
Group consensus? Unless the technology gets much better very quickly, the Volt and the entire electric car industry is doomed to a lagging position that may see it penetrate one or two percent of the car market over a period of years ... at best.
That prediction is being made by electric car proponents, so it cannot be dismissed as merely the biased critique of those who find the electric car industry a solution to a non-existent problem. We certainly do. Here are links to some of our previous articles:
VIDEO: The Volt − What a Wonderful Car
As Predicted, Electric Cars Foundering: GM Shuts Down the Volt
What is especially interesting about the discussion is that it looks frankly at the technology behind electric cars and concludes that it is simply not good enough nor expanding rapidly enough.
It is the battery in particular that is proving the weak link when it comes to producing electric cars. The technology is not especially satisfactory from a consumer standpoint. Meanwhile, internal combustion engines continue to advance in efficiency and power.
What bothers us most about the electric car industry is that it has all the hallmarks of what we might call a manufactured industry. We're well aware that the powers-that-be would like nothing more than to place individuals in electric cars because they are most controllable in terms of range and power.
Controlling people's movements is a big part of power elite domination – as those who seek world government continue to move ahead on numerous fronts. This is one reason for the emphasis on gas mileage. The more efficient cars get, the more complicated the engine gets as well.
When it comes to electric cars, the hope is obviously to combine so-called Smart Meters with plug-in autos. Haven't paid a speeding ticket or in some other way contravened various laws and regulations? It will be an easy thing to shut off the juice and render the individual transportation-less.
The electric car industry – and its necessity – are surely a kind of dominant social theme. While the Internet itself has provided us with insights into the basic falsity of most if not all of these fear-based promotions, they are continually propounded nonetheless.
This roundtable shows once again, however, that despite the best efforts of the powers-that-be to reconfigure people's transportation habits, drivers remain extraordinarily resistant to "solutions" that solve no real problem while generally raising costs and complexity.
You can see the video here:
(Video from AutolineDetroit's YouTube user channel.)