Volt Sales Rebound In February But Still Shy Of Projections

That's because Agent009 stopped publishing negative posts on the Volt every day :p

The other factors are the milder winter, the gas prices going up, and the Volts already sold making an impression on the public. If a Joe Schmoe like me can afford to drive one and has made "the leap" so maybe others can too.

So you believe Gingrich that gas prices can somehow magically drop down to $2.50? How exactly will that happen?

There is something called Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and anyone who cares about money should try to figure out what that is. Most people that buy the Volt do not care about saving money, they do care about saving on gas. We're beginning to see families now buying their second Volt and people who leased one thinking of buying one once the lease is up.

If you can't see beyond the Econo Chevy for $40,000 then maybe you need new glasses.

I know of one person who had a Volt and got rid of it. Everyone else is more than happy with it. For those people it is not a flop.

Is it perfect? No. Has it met and exceeded owners expectations, you betcha!

You can keep yelling that it is a flop, the same way people were saying (me included) 10 years ago that the Prius was a flop. Look at what happened.

There are two ways that gas will be $2.50/gal. again, one is if we have another Great Recession, the other is if people wake up, smell the coffee and replace their vehicle with an alternative fuel one.

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2012/02/28/n_chevrolet_volt_owner.cnnmoney/

Why do you think the Volt is a joke? Please explain that to me. Is the Panamera or the Rapide a joke because it is a four seater? Is the LS600h a joke because it is a hybrid sedan? How much do they cost?

You know, why don't you save yourself another $18k and buy a 15-year old Corolla?

GMs MPG calculation is made very simple, number of miles driven divided by the gallons of gas used. If you never go into extended range mode the fuel economy based on this calculation easily exceeds 250 MPG. There are people that manage to drive their Volt this way -- no gas used. The electricity consumption is measured in kWh/100 miles (or miles per kWh, MPK). My Volt currently gets 92 MPG and 40 kWh/100 miles or 2.5 MPK.

The EPA in all of their wisdom decided that having two numbers to measure fuel efficiency is too complicated (i.e. cannot compare across alternative fuel vehicles, such as CNG, FCEV, PHEV, EREV, EV, etc.) so they came up with MPGe or trying to equate the electric consumption to gasoline (33.7 kWh ~ 1 gal). According to the EPA the Volt is rated at 94 MPGe.

The problem with that is people charge their EV from different sources, some are mostly burning fossil fuels, others are entirely renewable so drawing any kind of equivalency is meaningless in that regard.

GM has quite a bit of an experience selling alternative fuel vehicles, remember the EV1, flex-fuel, diesel, all the mild hybrid trucks? The Volt is expensive to buy because it is expensive to make, and so are all EVs.

BMW, Mercedes, Lexus also want $40k for a small sedan, but that is not the point, the drive-train is the point. Justification for buying a car rarely boils down to just money. If it did, no one would ever drive a luxury or a performance car.

The cost for charging my Volt was $24 last month (~12c/kWh). The cost for gas while it was $3.50/gal with my previous ICE vehicle exceeded $200 a month. Doing a TCO calculation over 10 years assuming constant gas and electricity price showed that the Volt would cost me an extra $1,500. I think I can live with that.