The fact that you have to come up with such a contrived situation only shows how desperate you are to find fault with the Volt. In my humble estimation, on average, American drivers will encounter a situation like the one you described somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.0001 times per lifetime.
Regardless, I'm not convinced that the situation you described would even result in Propulsion Power Reduced Mode! In the two examples I gave above, the driver who did encounter that mode did so while driving on a depleted battery from Camp Verde, AZ on the way to the turnoff to Prescott, highway 169. The endpoint on that map link is about the highest point on the journey according to what I can tell from this tool. It shows that it is an elevation change of about 2,000 feet over the course of about a 6 mile stretch of road. The contrived situation that you described is a much, much shallower climb of 2,500 feet over about 90 miles. I doubt you would dig too far into your buffer throughout that climb. Furthermore, if you turned on Mountain Mode after your “friend gets a call”, you whould have plenty of time throughout that journey to allow Mountain Mode to build up a large buffer.
“Why am I being forced to pay for other people’s Volt fetish?”
I did a rough, back-of-the-envelop calculation a few weeks ago that put the cost of EV subsidies at around $9 per taxpayer per year. Contrast that with how much our Navy spends playing rent-a-cop to Persian Gulf oil tankers: $50 billion a year, or around $480 per year for a household with an income of $80,000.
So in my view, spending $9 a year on an EV subsidy (until it expires in a few years) in order to invest in a technology that could a) save us $480 a year for decades and decades to come and b) screw over OPEC as well... is an incredibly smart taxpayer investment.
George W. Bush certainly thought so—he is the one who signed the EV subsidy into law. And this is from his 2006 State of the Union: “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology.”
Uh...no. The situation is not ‘contrived’. The notion of making a last minute trip into the mountains (when you live near the mountains) seems not only plausible...but frankly the entire reason alot of people move to Colorado. And there is no buffer and there is not time. If you’ve used up the charge, you just flat can’t drive up into the mountains.
And frankly I don’t care if the EV subsidy is a fraction of a penny. Real conservatives have these things....which you don’t have...called Principles! Get it? Not one nickel of my money or anyine elses money should be confiscated fir somebody else’s toy. Tell me why I’m wrong and cite the appropriate section of the constitution.