did you really pay into it that much if you receive a hell of a lot more back then you ever put in? i think its a handout at some point. the problem in america is we look for laws not use personal responsibility.
Its clear that you can' or won't discuss the technical traits of this vehicle rationally. You're brainwashed and too personally invested. The cars design was innovative but its implementation and manufacture is extremely poor. Its marketing is downright dishonest. As a car salesman you seen entirely too comfortable with dishonesty. You can't even be honest with yourself. You've stupidly bought one of the worst cars ever built and feel the need to justify that purchase. To put it bluntly, you are an idiot.
Again, you are so hung up on the fact that the gas engine may at times directly power the car. You haven't pointed out anything else that is "wrong"with the car or "dishonest" with the advertising. I'm sorry it doesn't conform to your notion of what the car should be. You have yet to point what your ideal car would be. I guess when all else fails, just call me a dishonest salesman and hurl insults. Elite trader just isn't happy unless it's tearing something down.
Gas engine "may at times power the car"? Pulleease. Any normal person commutes farther than 25 miles per day and 99% of them cannot charge the vehicle at their place of employment so the vast majority of the time the car will operate on the not-so-efficient gasoline engine. My Ford Focus manages to get 42 mpg, you'd have thought GM could at least equip the car with an efficient gasoline engine when they knew the electric range was so anemic. Yes, I think it is dishonest of you to promote this vehicle like you are. I can buy a golfcart with greater electric range than the Volt and almost any modern car built these days has a more efficient gasoline engine. GM took a brilliant concept backed up by a brilliant design and ruined it to save a few bucks. Then they lied consistently about what the vehicle was and its capabilities causing massive loss of trust for the company and outright laughter about the car. You bought an Edsel. Congratulations, you belong to very exclusive club. Anybody who bought a Volt from you is likely to be thinking of wringing your neck right about now. Phhht!
Another thread I don't have the time to read the thread, so I apologize if I repeat a theme. I am a staunch conservative, yea not republican, conservative. Get it straight. I think people help people far more than our government or any other can help people. At the same time the electric car is a phony bought trick by the battery companies like Johnson Controls. They offer no advantage. They suck energy, via powerplants. Wow what a great alternative, yet another one the knucklhead liberals condem, but it is ok if it is not directly oil. Are you kidding, morons! On the other hand the pressure got the auto industry to make improvements that make the battery vehicles a non issue to a large extent. We have gas driven cars that can get for a relative cost about the same cost as these electric battery phonies. (not to mention an enviormental nightmare)But it took pressure to break the norm and make them do it. To me that is pathetic and an example of a loser industry. In tech, companies regularly come out with better and bury the old line, or make them better. What a sad state of affairs when business gets so big that real change can't occur until the uselss government tools step in. That really frightens me about our country. We lost the idea that people are better than government.
I'm still waiting for you to point out what you would actually like the vehicle to do. It has met my needs just fine. I'm at 203 lifetime MPG right now. On the volt stats website, for February, the % of EV use was 74%. So obviously it's meeting the needs of a lot of other people as well. Here are my stats. http://www.voltstats.net/Stats/Details/580
My recollection is that the original battery design was going to cost GM about $18k per vehicle not including development costs and factoring in large scale manufacturing efficiencies. That was going to eat into GM's profit margin per vehicle so they opted for lashing together many smaller commercially available batteries. But the lashups have too much volume overhead due to the need for contacts between every cell and the so the overall battery capacity was diminished unacceptably but GM decided to press on with production due likely to pressure from the Obama administration. It really was the single most destructive decision made about Volt production as it cut the electric range drastically. I don't know if the original battery really had gave the car a 200 mile range. That number was what they were saying at the Los Angeles car show about a year before the car went into production. The decision to use an off-the-shelf gasoline engine was the next terrible decision. Dropping the stylish coachwork and stretched out chassis design was another very bad decision. Marketing the vehicle dishonestly was the final and most harmful decision so far as public perception. As I've said, I was going to buy one but what came out of the factory did not even remotely resemble the cars shown across the country at car shows in technology or style.