The threat of climate change was enough for General Motors to make a bold gamble with their plug-in electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. Lest we forget it had nothing to do with climate change or global warming. The Chevy Volt was created out of a pure ideological liberal agenda. After the government bailout of General Motors (GM), the Obama White House had the control and influence they needed to shape future products that appealed to their radical environmental base. What was born was the Chevy Volt. And it's been nothing but a failure. As liberalism goes, though, they believe that more money needs to be thrown at the project and that will fix everything. What they're missing, as does every totalitarian regime with centralized government control, is consumer demand. And that can't be bought.
The January sales numbers are in...and they're not pretty. Only 603 Chevy Volts were sold, which is the worst month for the fledgling vehicle since last August. For comparison, 1,529 Volts were sold in December, which was the car's best month. Last week, GM North America President Mark Reuss blamed the low sales on bad publicity. Certainly the government investigation of the safety issues were problematic, but the Volt was no spring chicken prior to the White House suppressing the safety issues.
To make matters worst, GM is spending a boatload of money promoting and advertising the Chevy Volt up to and during this Sunday's Super Bowl. They've been promoting the Chevy brand with the Twitter hashtag #SuperBowl, where they are giving away 20 vehicles. On Super Bowl Sunday, GM will be running an ad for the Volt, pinning it as "not the car they wanted to build, it's the car America had to build." The proper description should be: the car the Obama White House forced us to build if we wanted the bailout money that we needed.
Top down, centralized, authoritarian government never produces products that consumers want. Period.
Darrell Lect is a contributing editor for Habledash.
