The Sad Plight of Obama’s Edsel (The Volt won't make it to 2017 -- the time he says he'll buy one)

National Review ^ | 03/20/2012 | Rich Lowry

[SeekAndFind]

President Barack Obama says he wants to buy a Chevy Volt when he’s out of office in five years. If getting into a General Motors electric automobile means so much to him, he’d better hope he loses in November. What the president dubbed the “car of the future” in a visit to a Volt plant may not make it to January 2017.

The partially government-owned General Motors has suspended production of its government-approved miracle car and temporarily laid off 1,300 workers at a Detroit plant. The halt is the result of a piddling detail lost in the gushers of praise for a big, bad car company supposedly learning the error of its environment-destroying ways — people don’t want to buy the damn thing.

GM hoped to sell 10,000 Volts last year and sold only 7,500. It planned to sell 45,000 this year and is scaling back production to meet the real rather than the imaginary demand. The Volt is the Solyndra of automobiles, another Obama-touted recipient of government subsidies that was succeeding as a great paladin of the future in all the speeches and press releases until it ran into hard market realities.

The Volt is too expensive, too small, and too complicated to appeal to all but a tiny slice of what is already a tiny segment of the car market. Hybrids have never been more than about 3 percent of all U.S. sales. To buy a Volt, you need the money to splurge and the exquisite environmental consciousness to think plugging in your car will help save the planet, even though about half of electricity comes from coal. The Volt is as much affectation as car.

It costs more than $40,000. At that price, perhaps GM should have made it part of the Cadillac brand rather than Chevy. Most buyers dropping that much prefer to go all the way and buy something really nice — say, an Audi or a BMW.

According to GM, the average income of a Volt purchaser is $175,000 a year. These well-heeled buyers get a $7,500 tax credit for selecting a car out of reach of many Americans, a trickle-up redistribution toward the upper, politically correct end of the car market.

It’s not that the Volt isn’t a fine piece of machinery. It is a smooth ride and has been well-reviewed. It’s just not going “to make Big Oil sweat,” in the words of a smitten writer for the New York Times. Big Oil presumably has other things to worry about than a rounding error in the more than 12 million vehicles sold in the U.S. every year.

As Henry Payne of the Detroit News argues, the Chevy Volt is basically the electric version of the gas-powered Chevy Cruze. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s rating that the Volt gets 60 miles per gallon, as a practical matter it’s more like 35 (it can go less than 40 miles on battery alone and then needs to switch over to gas). That’s comparable to the Cruze, which costs half the amount, has greater range, seats more people, and is easier to operate since all it requires is a visit to the filling station. GM sells more than 200,000 Cruzes a year.

The Volt is looking like Obama’s Edsel. What the president so confidently deems “the future” when he talks of energy and cars is his ideological vision dressed up in the language of historical inevitability. If he had been told in 2009 that the real future of the car market would be trucks, SUVs, and the like, which again ticked above half of sales, he surely would have blanched. If he had been told that technological breakthroughs would bring a future of new oil production, he would have been no less insistent on funding the likes of Solyndra.

For all his smug confidence about his vision of the future, he doesn’t truly know what car he will be driving in five years. If he stays true to his word, it might have to be a secondhand Volt.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review

[Vince Ferrer]

I like the article, but I would not compare the Volt to the Edsel. Instead, I would compare the Volt and Obama to the Volkswagen.

Most people think the Volkswagon Beetle came from the 60's, but it was actually developed in the 30s under the NAZIs. Autos at the time were upper middle class or better luxuries, and so Hitler wanted a car that ordinary people could buy and drive. The result became the Volkswagon "People's car" Beetle.

The design and concept was a smash hit. So much so that the Beetle survived being associated with Hitler, World War II and NAZIs, and went on to become a wildly successful global brand. This is because like the Model T before it, it pushed the boundary of the middle class lifestyle downwards to include more people. A generation after Americans bombed German cities, their baby boomer kids would drive around in Beetles as their first car, freeing their generation from home.

So in 2012, what is the people's car? The top candidate for me is the Tata Nano in India:

This is the world's smallest and cheapest car. It would probably not have a big market here, but for India, it once again pushes a middle class lifestyle down within reach of millions more Indian families, which had to drive much more dangerous motorcycles.

I actually like the Volt and the drive that GM had to produce it. It generally does what they said it would. Allowed to succeed or fail on its own merits, it is a good example of the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism.

But the Volt has been linked now to the Obama administration and the auto bailout, and it is going to be judged along with it. Its success or failure now is one of politics, not engineering and marketing. The Volt was already being developed by the time Obama came onto the scene, but since the bailout of GM, the Obama administration has effectively claimed the Volt as one of its accomplishments, as a benefit of the bailout.

So how then, does Obama and the Volt compare to these? Obama and the Volt are actually the anti-Volkswagon. Rather than continuing to push a middle class lifestyle downwards to include ever more people, Obama immediately added higher CAFE restrictions for mileage, which will drive up the price of cars. As for Obama's Volt, it accomplishes Obama's goals of pushing electric hybrid cars, but the high price and maintenance costs make it unaffordable for most. People aren't rushing to buy it, because it doesn't meet their needs. The only way he can sell it is to force people, through involuntary subsidies or government buying.

In comparison Hitler, one of the worst dictators in history, wanted a people's car for the masses that they would want. And they loved the car, because it benefited themselves. On the other hand the democratically elected president Obama, however, wants to impose a car design on people that we were not crying out for, but is one that fits the mold of what he wants us to drive.