It’s a little more than a ‘re-worked Prius’. It’s a mostly-series hybrid, while the Prius is a parallel hybrid. The requirements for each are quite different.
And yet people still buy and love Ferraris. Look, if all we cared about in our vehicles was great fuel economy at the cheapest price, we’d all be driving Toyota Echos. The fact is, people look for a lot more in a car, and not just in its specifications. Cars are a lifestyle statement. SUVs killed the minivan, despite the minivan being a generally superior people-carrier, because people don’t want to drive minivans. They’re not cool.
So the Volt is a fine niche car. For people who want to make a statement about the environment while giving up very little in range and creature comforts, it’s pretty nice. Overpriced? Sure. But then so is a Mercedes compared to a Ford equivalent.
I remember a Harvard Lampoon parody of a Ford Granada ad. Back in the day, Ford was trying to sell the Granada as being feature-for-feature competitive with a Mercedes. They had ads with comparison charts of the Mercedes’ and Granada’s horsepower, interior features, etc. The Harvard Lampoon had a fake ad that went something like this:
And the tagline:
The point being that a car is a lot more than a summary of its specifications page.
On this we agree. Tax rebates for a specific technology are a really bad idea, because it puts government in the business of picking winning and losing technologies and they’re no damned good at it. For example, if hydrogen fuel cells had been just a little bit farther along in the Bush years, you might have had a fuel cell tax credit, and that might have suppressed research into hybrid technology. And hybrid tax credits may have suppressed research into into fuel-saving technologies.
Tax credits for high mileage make some sense in that they help correct for the externalities created by CO2 emissions. But if that’s what you really care about, a better way to do it is to offer a sliding tax credit for ANY car based on its CO2 output. Don’t even use MPG as a standard - a car that gets the same MPG on natural gas emits about half the carbon. The goal of a tax credit, if you’re going to have one at all (and that’s debatable), is to be as technology-agnostic as possible, and to precisely target the thing you’re trying to reduce.
Early adopters are exactly the people who don’t care as much about cost. The first Apple Macintosh cost $3499, and it didn’t even have a hard drive. It had a 512 x 384 monochrome display. The first ‘laptops’ were monstrosities in a suitcase with tiny CRT displays and huge floppy drives. And they cost thousands of dollars. And yet, people still bought them. Hell, I bought a TRS-80 Model I computer for $1199, and it didn’t even have a floppy drive - just a cassette tape unit. It was utterly useless for just about any real practical thing you might try to do with it. But early adopters bought them.
And so it is with the Volt. The people who care more about having the latest technology, or getting good gas mileage in a ‘cool’ way than they do about money will buy Volts. Apparently, there aren’t too many of these people, but they’re out there. Whether there are enough of them to justify making a car like this is the real question.
You also have to remember that auto makers make ‘loss leader’ cars all the time, so it’s not fair to single out the Volt as being expensive when looking just at its sales and R&D cost. For one thing, that R&D may trickle into other GM vehicles. For another, GM may be trying to shed a ‘gas guzzler’ image, and the Volt helps that along. In the same way, car companies that want to move ‘upscale’ will sometimes produce limited-production luxury cars that don’t turn a profit on their own merits, but which help change the image of the company.
For example, GM already did this with the EV-1 - in strict accounting terms, it lost the company a bundle of money. But it was never intended to be a profit center. It was intended to build the company’s bona fides as a technology company, to help build company knowledge of electrics, and to test the marketplace to see if people would accept low range vehicles and electric vehicles in general.
If there were no tax rebates, and if GM wasn’t in bed with the government, then we could look at the Volt in this light a little more fairly. But since the decision-making around the Volt has been heavily distorted by the bailout and tax credits, we can’t tell if it would have made it to market anyway.
Perhaps. But the Volt was already well along in development before the bailout, and it’s a harder decision to say whether you should abandon all that R&D already invested.
You’re not summarizing my point - you’re distorting it. There was no need for a summary, since I think I stated my point fine. But since you put that out there, let me give you the real summary: Bang for the buck isn’t everything, or no one would buy Mustangs, either. And Ferraris wouldn’t exist. In fact, people have complex reasons for buying cars - some practical, some psychological, some political, some to fit in with the crowd, or to stand out from it. Sometimes just for the love of the shape of the thing. That’s why there are cars at every price point that do roughly the same thing.
The Volt is attractive to a certain kind of buyer. No, it’s not the best ‘bang for the buck’, but then no new car is - if you want the best bang for the buck, buy an older used car. If you want the best fuel mileage, buy a scooter. Since not everyone does this, it’s clear that ‘bang for the buck’ isn’t the only factor.
In the same sense that flying a rocket to Mars is not a difficult engineering problem - it’s just a gravity issue. Right?
Duh. And if horses were wishes, we’d all be eating steak. Engineering is an exercise in compromise management. Battery technology is what it is. It’s a difficult engineering problem all on its own. But given the batteries that exist, the Volt is a pretty awesome attempt to use them in conjunction with a gas generator to provide practical, efficient transportation.
That doesn’t mean it’s a market success, or even that it should be. The Concorde was a fantastic engineering achievement, but an utter failure as a practical aircraft. It lost huge gobs of money for the governments that tried to force the market through strategic ‘investments’ in technology. It may even have done damage to industry R&D as a whole by pushing companies into trying to come up with their own supersonic planes, when later we discovered that the efficiencies of fast subsonic flight are just overwhelming.
How many dollars that could have been spent on earlier subsonic R&D like high-bypass turbos and such got diverted and blown due to government interference in the market? Who knows? But whether or not the government should have been in the business of ‘investing’ in R&D has nothing to do with whether or not the designers of the Concorde came up with an amazing machine given the constraints they had. You can admire it as an engineering achievement while recognizing it was an utter failure as a government venture into the aviation marketplace.