Bob Lutz To Glenn Beck: “Eat Your Heart Out. Volt Is The Future.”

[Noel Park]

Marc Lee,

Good man! Thanks.

Volt 1756!

[DonC]

Go to edmunds.com or your car site of choice and pick a 2011 prius and equip it as the volt is...i did this last week and the Prius came out at 38.5k...so how do you figure it is cheaper?

Marc, great point. When I did this I got $37K (Volt would be more like $44K) So yes, after rebate there isn't much difference in price. That doesn't mean, however, there isn't a lot of difference between the cars in such areas as ... noise. I gave a friend who owns a Prius a test drive and he was blown away by how quiet it was. His comment was: "In my Prius I can't hear my daughter in the back seat but in this car it would be like she was whispering in my ear".

But yes, the Prius advocates like to compare the price of a stripper Prius with a fully loaded Volt (not including the rebate) and then declare the Prius is considerably cheaper.

I will say that GM bears some responsibility for the perception that the Volt is so pricey. Why doesn't it advertise the price AFTER REBATE. This is what Tesla has done from day one with the Model S. And why does it include the DESTINATION CHARGE in the price? A price of $32,780 with an asterisk beats hell out of a price of $41,000. Maybe WOT can tell explain why this is so hard.

[DonC]

Lutz is also correct that many tangential issues such as political ones have obscured the engineering achievement which is represented by the Volt. The Volt is a wildly cool car from a technological standpoint. The engineers truly did an outstanding job. Dan Neil, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, summed it up best when he wrote that "[a] bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet".

[fishhawk]

A price of $32,780 with an asterisk beats hell out of a price of $41,000.

Actually, they do here: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt/

For us Texans, and probably others, you don't really save $7500. That's because the $7500 is a tax credit; you still have to pay state sales tax on that $7500 (6.2% in Texas, $465) because the credit occurs after the sale. Now if they made the $7500 an instant rebate at the dealer, that would save almost enough to buy the 240v Voltec charger. But the dealers want nothing to do with that, since the government screwed up the cash-for-clunkers program (rebates that were denied, more claims than funds, etc).