posted December 07, 2011 12:20 PM            

The latest news of the unhappy fusion between Big Government and Big Business comes to us from AutoGuide:

Following on from the announcement that GM is looking at redesigning the Chevrolet Volt’s lithium-ion battery system in the wake of several highly publicized fires resulting from test crashes, comes further news that both the automaker and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration​ delayed disclosure of their original findings by months.
Apparently, way back in June, General Motors​ heard about a Volt fire that happened three weeks after said vehicle was crash tested, yet it wasn’t until November that the company, nor NHTSA disclosed there was a potential problem, urging both dealers and customers to drain the battery pack immediately following an accident.

As a result the public relations nightmare surrounding Chevy’s halo vehicle appears to be deepening, though a good deal of the blame in this case also rests with NHTSA.

Joan Claybrook​, a former adminstrator at NHTSA believes part of the reason for the delay was the “fragility of Volt sales.” Yet she also believes that “NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert, not to tell them [customers] for six months makes no sense to me.”

(Emphases mine.) As a longtime student of the Volt debacle, I must admit I didn’t think they’d actually start catching fire. Along with the government suppression of safety data, it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have dared to write into a satire, for fear of going over the top.

An interesting point on the subject been raised by Clarence Ditlow, executive director for the Center of Auto Safety in Washington D.C. He said that he is “surprised that NHTSA didn’t drain the battery after crash testing as it is standard procedure to empty the fuel tank on conventional gasoline powered vehicles.” He also says that the NHTSA incident underlines the need for “greater transparency when conducting crash tests,” as well as setting proper industry standards when it comes to new technologies.

It seems like the more talk we hear of “transparency” in Washington, the less we actually get. Soon we will be rendered completely blind by a billowing cloud of transparency promises.

GM has been providing loaner vehicles to Volt owners concerned about getting turned into eco-friendly charcoal briquettes, and has dished out 5,000 of them so far, which must represent a very healthy slice of the tiny Volt user base. The cost of five thousand loaner cars isn’t going to do much for the already abysmal financial status of the Volt project, which gobbled up hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies before the first low-emission fiery deathtrap rolled off the line, to say nothing of the incentives offered to buyers.

This is just one high-profile example of the way government involvement with business corrupts the consumer data stream. Very few Volt buyers had the foggiest notion of what the vehicle actually cost, and now we’ve learned that important information about its performance was kept from them. Both green and corporatist ideology provided powerful incentives for the perpetuation of illusions.

Why would anyone expect fair and honest performance from the government “referees” when they’re also players in the game? The further we move from a rigid separation of political and economic interests, in which a tiny government meticulously enforces a limited body of clearly described laws, the less impartial those “referees” become. Politicians who rail against “bailouts” and “lobbyists” are curiously silent about General Motors and its refusal to repay the American taxpayer, even though it sits on sizable cash reserves. And now the same people who presume that all CEOs are basically crooks and cheats, until proven otherwise, turn out to be very… flexible when it comes to enforcing the rules on a product and corporation whose success is of keen interest to the Administration and its labor union allies.

posted December 22, 2011 11:28 AM            

Now, tell me again....where are you going to plug in these fire traps to recharge the batteries when O'Bomber and the rest of the eco-nuts shut off the electric power in America?
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum26/HTML/000925.html

The Volt Re-Evaluated: $250,000 Per Car
Behold the magic of government subsidies
by John Hayward
12/22/2011

I’ve long been fascinated by the sad tale of the Chevy Volt​, a heavily subsidized electric car nobody wants. It’s one of the purest, most perfect examples of government attempting to artificially create a marketplace, and failing miserably.

At the time of the Volt’s launch, when rebates brought the consumer price down to $33,500 (which is still horribly high for such a tiny, unappealing car, and doesn’t factor in the enormous maintenance costs of the electrical system) I decided to total up all the subsidies pumped into the vehicle’s creation, divide them by projected sales, and came up with a per-unit real cost of $81,000.

Very few Volt buyers had any awareness of the vehicle’s true cost, because other people paid the difference between the $33,500 they were plunking down and the $81,000 true cost. That’s an appalling corruption of the vital financial information stream. Cost is data. Nobody knows what anything really costs anymore, due to the vast machinery of subsidies and penalties thumping and groaning away just out of our view, but the Volt was an especially egregious example.

A year and a half later, after a few Volts burst into flames, James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy did an exhaustive evaluation of the Volt’s current true cost. He included state and federal assistance spread over “18 government deals that included loans, rebates, grants, and tax credits.” This was measured against the roughly 6,000 Volts sold to date.

The result of Hohman’s calculations, as reported by Michigan Capitol Confidential, is that “each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it.” That’s a worst-case scenario, as some of the companies involved in producing Volt components might not meet the targets necessary to receive the subsidies. On the other hand, Hohman did not include the massive taxpayer bailout that made it possible for Government Motors​ to exist and push out those unloved little electric firecrackers, or the incentives paid to companies that lost bids to provide Volt batteries.

The Michigan Capitol Confidential article garnered a laughably weak response from GM:

Greg Martin, director of Policy and Washington Communications for GM, wrote in an email, "While much less than the hundreds of billions of dollars that Japanese and Korean auto and battery manufacturers have received over the years, the investments provided by several different Administrations and Congresses to jump-start the country's fledgling battery technology and domestic electric vehicle industries (not just specifically for the Volt as Ford's offering will also use LG Chem batteries and Fisker will use the A123 system for example) matches the same foresight and innovation leadership that other countries are exhibiting and which America has historically taken pride in."

Martin added that the Mackinac Center's math was "simple and selective." However, he offered no data or specifics to support his assertion.

Once again, compulsive force is used to “transform” the economy - “jump starting the country’s fledgling battery technology and domestic electric vehicle industries” as Martin put it – and the result is an unmitigated disaster. The only way to finish the job and force customers to buy Volts, as General Motors CEO Dan Akerson openly speculated last year, would be to artificially jack up the price of gasoline until “green” cars become reasonable alternatives. Akerson had an extra $1 per gallon of extra federal gas taxes in mind at the time, although I’m not sure that would be enough anymore. Maybe $2 or $3 per gallon would do it. That would also give the government more cash to spend on its wise Solyndra-style industrial policies.

Well, at least the $3 billion in taxpayer subsidies we’ve been forced to pump into the Volt are putting sustainable cars in the hands of the poor, right? Er… not really, no. Here’s what Akerson said about Volt buyers in an interview he gave last week:

Q: Are you moving past the early technology adopters on the Volt at this point, or has any data surprised you on who is actually buying this vehicle?

A: The average purchaser of a Volt is earning $170,000 a year. About a third of the customers haven't been in a Chevy store in more than five years and half have never been in there. They aren't just early adopters.

Some of them - I think roughly half - are either Prius or BMW owners. So one, you could say Prius owners were probably early adopters in the olden days, but that's kind of passed through. But BMW people want styling, good design, and an innovative powertrain, or power source, and I think Volt is a game changer.