Well, almost. Serra Chevrolet in Southfield, Michigan — former home of American Motors, if I remember correctly — is moving about 25 Chevy Volts every month.

And oh, they do try hard:

The dealer trains each salesperson specifically on the Volt for at least 12 hours and encourages them to cross-sell the car to customers that come in looking for anything from an SUV to a midsize to a compact. To put a green point on the deal, about 15 percent of the dealer’s electric power is provided by two windmills located behind the building.

“You don’t want that big, hulking Suburban.”

I wonder if that’s ever actually worked.

The grotesque blob to the left is one of the two winners of the 2012 European Car of the Year award, and its sheer hideosity, to me anyway, suggests something Peugeot might have come up with after hitting the schnapps really, really hard. But no, this is an American car with a schnoz transplant: the Opel Ampera — to be sold in the UK with a Vauxhall badge — is the European version of the currently-in-hibernation Chevrolet Volt.

Apparently Volkswagen’s tiny Up!, exclamation point included, took second place, and the worldwide Ford Focus finished third.

Both Volt and Ampera will be sold in Europe, though Opel, being ostensibly a more prestigious name than Chevrolet, carries a higher list price: €42,900 versus €41,950 (including VAT). The Vauxhall variant, due in the spring, starts at £33,995 including VAT, but before Her Majesty’s Plug-In Car Grant.

Eventually, I’m told, the Volt will be sold in Australia as a Holden, and it will probably look better than either the Chevy or the Opel.

Still undetermined: if, after invoking Volt and Ampere, GM will come up with more electrical names for future EVs. (Watt TF, perhaps?)

Maximum Bob Lutz, GM’s original champion of the Chevrolet Volt, says that those damn wingnuts are badmouthing the car for no reason. The worst offender:

[T]he Oscar for totally irresponsible journalism has to go to The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, with, as its key guest, Lou Dobbs. Amid much jocular yukking, the Volt was depicted as a typical federal failure. In attempting to explain why Chevy has sold fewer than 8,000 Volts, Dobbs states, flatly, “It doesn’t work.” He elaborates, “It doesn’t go fast and go far on electricity. What happens is it catches fire,” adding that Chevy has recalled some 8,000 Volts. Bill O’Reilly, nodding approvingly, helpfully interjects: “So they’ve recalled cars that haven’t been sold.” Boiled down to the subtext, Dobbs’ message was this: “All Volts catch fire, and therefore all Volts have been recalled.” That simply isn’t the case.

The NHTSA, in fact, has declared that the Volt is no more likely to catch fire than any other car, though some people still insist that the fix is in. And recalling cars that haven’t yet been sold is nothing unusual.

Besides, if the Volt were a “typical federal failure,” it would look like this.

Bill Quick spurns the Chevrolet Volt — they’d have to pay him to take one, he says — which prompted regular commenter Lorenzo to note:

In an earlier age, it would have been a limited production Cadillac for a particular clientele at a high price, introducing technology that would trickle down later to the rest of the GM lineup. Had they done that, GM could have used the car to demonstrate their engineering chops in new tech, with small numbers that could be tended to more closely, as all new tech must be, and explained as “exclusive” service.

The General did in fact build a Cadillac version as a concept, under the ungainly name “Converj”; after hemming and hawing for many months, GM decided to add it to the Cadillac line as the “ELR,” not to be confused with ELO, at a price which is supposed to undercut Tesla’s Model S, which starts at $50k before you pick your battery pack.

Had they started with a Cadillac, I suspect they would have sold just as many — or just as few, depending on your perspective. And when this technology filtered down to Chevyland, it would have one built-in selling point: “Hey, this is like that Caddy, only 15 grand cheaper!” But now the Cadillac faithful won’t touch it, because it’s going to be a glitzed-up Chevy. Can you say “Cimmaron”? (Said the guy who drives an Infiniti based on a five-grand-cheaper Nissan model.)

Mitt Romney is not impressed with the Chevrolet Volt:

If you want to know exactly what Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney thinks about the Chevrolet Volt, listen to his laugh before he answers a question about the car posed to him during a radio interview on WRKO in Boston recently. Romney was asked what he thought about the car, and he responded with a dismissive-sounding laugh by labeling the plug-in hybrid an “idea whose time has not come.” He later explained that his attitude is proved correct by the Volt’s low sales numbers. Whatever the reason, he clearly does not approve of the car.

This from a man who can’t build up any additional market share in his own political party. It is to laugh.

The last Chevy so politicized was the Corvair, half a century ago, and it suffered from the same problem: nobody liked it but the buyers. I suspect the Volt story will play out the same way, with all manner of yammering in the air while GM quietly fixes any lingering issues with the machine — but of course by then it will be too late.

If Aunt Mittunia wants my vote, he’ll rechannel his wrath towards those Washington hotheads who don’t know anything about cars except that they want to regulate them.

Optional engines are still the rule rather than the exception in the American car market: almost everything passing itself off as a “family” sedan comes with a base inline-four, though a few grand extra will get you a V6 or at least a turbo for that four, and pickup buyers revel in their ability to select exactly the right engine for what they imagine are their needs.

The hybrids and the electrics, up to now, hadn’t offered such options. Tesla’s upcoming Model S has the same 300-kW (about 400 hp) motor throughout the line. However, Tesla will be offering three different battery packs: the larger the pack, the greater the range and the higher the performance. The base version ($50k after the Federal tax credit) gets a 40-kWh pack, reportedly good for 0-60 in 6.5 seconds and a range of 165 miles. Ante up another ten grand and get the 65-kWh pack, cutting 0.6 seconds off zero-to-sixty and extending range to 230 miles. Yet another ten grand will bring you the 85-kWh pack, bringing you to a 300-mile range and slicing 0-60 to 5.6. (There’s a “performance” version beyond that, with a high-performance inverter, that drops 0-60 into the mid-fours.) The best-selling pure-electric, the Nissan Leaf, comes with a modest 24-kWh battery pack; Chevrolet’s Volt carries 16 kWh.

All the Tesla battery packs will carry an 8-year warranty, though only the 85-kWh version specifies unlimited mileage.

(See also the pricing analysis at The Truth About Cars.)

Last year, General Motors gave Jay Leno one of the very first Chevrolet Volts. (Like he doesn’t have enough cars already.) They were thoughtful enough to turn it over to him with a full (9.3 gallons) tank of gas — which, says Leno, he hasn’t used up yet in over ten thousand miles:

“It’s my daily driver,” he said. “It really is. I commute in it to work every day. My commute, and all my other daily running around, totals less than 35 miles.”

Chevrolet claims that the Volt can travel about 40 miles on electric power alone, under normal driving conditions, before the juice in the batteries would be depleted, after which the car’s small gasoline engine would provide added range.

“You get 40 miles free, as they say,” Mr. Leno said. “Because of the way I drive it, it almost never kicks into gasoline mode.”

Which is a good thing, because the Volt requires premium. Then again, Jay Leno can probably afford it.

There are times when I just can’t figure out Consumer Reports.

In November, there’s a sidebar in the Cars section that says the following:

We now recommend the [Chevrolet] Volt plug-in hybrid after new data from our 2011 Annual Auto Survey shows it earned much better than average reliability. Very few of the 116 Volt respondents had any serious problems in the first few months of ownership.

Which seems reasonable to me. All the major hybrids — Toyota, Honda, Ford — are showing better-than-decent reliability figures, perhaps because of the extra development time that goes into hybrid design: you’ve got to have pretty tight tolerances, or it won’t work at all. If the sample size seems small, well, there are only a couple of thousand Volts out there; it’s at least as statistically valid as responses on, say, 15,000 Camrys. (If you own a Porsche, your mileage may vary.)

In the CR road tests, the Volt scored an okay, if not inspiring, 67, about four points behind the baby Lexus (CT200h) hybrid.

None of this would pose a problem except that in the same issue, they test a Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, their sample of which proved to be deeply flawed: it scored, they said, “too low to recommend.” The Sonata rolled up a score of 69, two points above the Volt.

Now it was my understanding that CR’s reliability ratings and road-test scores had nothing to do with one another. The criteria for Recommended:

“… did well in our road tests, had average or better reliability in our subscriber survey, and performed at least adequately if included in government or insurance-industry safety tests.”

The safety details for the Sonata Hybrid, as given, look fine to me, and better than anything else tested in that issue. Something here doesn’t add up.

Kim Reynolds drove a Chevrolet Volt from Detroit to Los Angeles for the October issue of Motor Trend, and the general dearth of charging stations along the way prompted this tongue-in-cheek observation:

Nissan Leaf drivers attempting to cross the country might be the solution to our nation’s dwindling rural population. Eventually, they’ll become stranded far from the coast’s handy plugs, and be forced to find an apartment and a job.

At least, I think it was tongue-in-cheek.

Ho-hum. Another day, another ill-informed bureaucrat:

To show her support for American workers, President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis, has junked the standard black limo and purchased a new Chevrolet Equinox to ride around Washington in. The problem: the crossover SUV is built and assembled in Canada from parts also made in Canada.

Of course, the “domestic-content” figure you see on the Monroney sticker includes, by law, Canadian content, and the Equinox, which is considered 66 percent “domestic,” makes a pretty good showing next to, say, Chevy’s Volt, which checks in with 40 percent.

And anyway, Canadian autoworkers these days make more than their US counterparts:

It’s cheaper to build in Mexico, and thanks to 1994′s North American Free Trade Agreement, it comes with little penalty. Labor rates account for less than 10 percent of overall vehicle cost, [Matteo] Fini [of IHS Automotive] says. But within that, the difference is significant. In 2010, Canadian autoworkers averaged $38.77 an hour in U.S. dollars, including benefits. Their U.S. counterparts averaged $33.46. Mexican autoworkers, in contrast, made just $3.75 an hour.

Pejman Yousefzadeh observes:

Of course, it might have been better for all involved if instead of engaging in economic nationalist showboating, the Labor Secretary — and the rest of the Obama Administration, for that matter — used this opportunity to teach people that the world economy is interconnected, that goods and services have a distinctly transnational aspect to them, and that as a consequence, it would be counterproductive (to say the least) to use economic nationalism as an excuse for destructive policies like protectionism, or the imposition of tariffs that lead to a trade war.

But wouldn’t someone have to teach the Administration first?

I have never had much faith in dashboard MPG readings, having seen both 60 and 6 mpg during the same trip in a borrowed Infiniti G35. Apparently Nissan hasn’t learned anything, according to Kim Reynolds at Motor Trend (8/11):

[T]he Leaf’s [range] display is virtually an info-slinky. Pull away from the charger with an indicated 106-mile range, and it’ll drop eight miles by the end of the block. I found myself finally ignoring the numbers and counting the remaining battery bar-graph segments, but even this is iffy as, per Mike Duoba of Argonne National Lab, “a battery is like a rubber bucket.”

The EV blog Electric Cars are for Girls attempts to explain this phenomenon:

Most of the confusion in the computer calculated range is that it constantly recalculates available range based on whether you’re going fast or slow or up or down hill. It figures that say you’re presently going up a two mile grade that your range based on that climb until your batteries are depleted. (It doesn’t know it’s only for two miles.) As soon as you reach the top and go down the other side it recalculates based on the down hill and your range goes back up again. You just have to understand how it thinks and you will get that light bulb moment and not worry.

Emphasis added. Okay, fair enough. Obviously Nissan can’t make these things psychic.

Then again, back to Reynolds in MT:

Unless you drive like a maniac, if the Volt’s display says it will go 37 miles in EV mode, it’ll deliver between 36 and 38.

What is Chevy doing right?

In a head-to-head comparo (one of six) in the August ’11 issue, Car and Driver recommends the Chevrolet Volt over the Lexus CT200h hybrid, and scribe Aaron Robinson demonstrates his mastery of the fine art known as Praising With Faint Damns:

Lord knows, it’s not gorgeous. And the cockpit’s tall, square screens and touch-sensitive buttons look like the designers locked themselves up with a Commodore PET, a Betamax, and the original Tron on loop.

But it’s not often that you get to park pioneering propulsion technology in your garage.

Robinson, that rotter, has now given me the urge to see one of these contraptions for myself, even though I’ve seen the pictures. Then again, how was he to know that I’ve owned several Commodore machines and still have a Betamax and a copy (on laserdisc, yet!) of Tron?

The Chevrolet Volt goes national this fall — dealers in all 50 states are now taking orders, though most of the country won’t see the car until November — and GM has announced that the $41,000 base price will be reduced to $39,995. (The $7500 Federal tax credit continues.) A Volt tricked out with everything on the option sheet will creep into the $46,000 range, assuming the dealers don’t slap a few thousand worth of “market adjustment” onto the sticker, which is a lot to assume.

What no one knows so far is how much real demand there will be for Chevy’s plugmobile once the floodgates are opened. Worst-case scenario is something like what happened with the US version of the smart fortwo: everybody who wanted one got one early, and then sales tanked. About the only thing we can be sure of is that Glenn Beck won’t buy one.

In a piece called “The EV Expectation Gap,” The Truth About Cars editor Edward Niedermeyer reproduces this graph from an Accenture study, and it looks to me like electric cars like Nissan’s Leaf are going to have a whole lot of trouble selling to anyone beyond committed green folk:

Survey respondents evidently want a single charge to last for eight days’ worth of driving.

One current EV — Tesla’s $100k-plus Roadster — claims a range close to 400 km, though it seats only two, snugly, and cargo space is theoretical at best. And while it does zero to sixty in a shade under four seconds, actually verifying this for yourself will cut into that range rather substantially.

The Chevrolet Volt, with its gasoline-engine backup, can actually pull off something close to a 400-km range for less than half what Tesla asks for the Roadster, and it seats four. I suppose there might be EV purists out there who reject the Volt because it occasionally burns some gasoline, and premium gasoline at that. If there’s a lot of them, Niedermeyer’s conclusion seems inevitable:

[T]here’s a giant disconnect (nearly ten-fold in fact) between the actual number of kilometers driven each day and the range expectations for future EV purchases. Meanwhile, 62% of respondents rejected battery swapping, the most credible current solution for range anxiety, for reasons that are not immediately clear. In short, Energy Secretary Chu had better be right when he says EV range will triple and costs will be reduced over the next six years… otherwise, EVs will die a quick death at the hand of consumers’ outsized range expectations.

And this time they won’t be able to blame General Motors.

Addendum: “In a land where 40-mile commutes are a lot more common than 4-mile ones, the Nissan Leaf has a tough row to hoe.”

As they will happily tell you at the drop of a hat, the guys at Consumer Reports get no freebies: they buy everything they test. Back in April, they mentioned that they’d gotten their hands on a Chevrolet Volt, though the law of supply and demand being what it is, they’d had to fork out five grand over sticker to get it.

I suspect they got more than one letter like this, as seen in the June issue:

I was dismayed to read that the dealer added a $5,000 fee to the cost of your Chevy Volt. I would have walked (no, run) away. You should have done so, likewise. As a taxpayer, I am also dismayed that the dealer is using most of the $7,500 tax credit for this car to line its pockets.

Um, this is what dealers do when they have a hot product: line their pockets. The Volt is in high demand in the four or five places you can actually buy one. But there are doofuses out there who believe they have a Constitutional right to buy things at MSRP or lower. I see them all the time on message boards, usually with questions along these lines:

How much can I expect the dealer to knock off if I pay cash for the car?

A realistic answer — “Since he’s not going to make anything on the financing, he might actually charge you more” — leaves these people incredibly butthurt.

Besides, early adopters almost always get soaked. Ask the guy who thought himself incredibly fortunate to get a $900-list VCR for $750 in 1982. (I have reference to me.) And nobody was offering a tax credit, either.

For their part, the CR guys said that they wanted to get that Volt report out in a timely manner, and if that cost them extra, so be it.

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten has calculated that possession of a Chevrolet Volt makes you sexier — but not all that much:

I assure her that I am a working journalist and that my question is purely hypothetical. Judging by appearances alone, I ask, what would be my theoretical chance of having sex with her, expressed as a percentage?

“Three,” she says finally.

He then gestures toward the Volt, and says:

“This is my ride,” I say. “Does this new information change the hypothetical answer at all?”

She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly.

“Three-point-five.”

Hey, it’s a 16.7-percent improvement. Isn’t that worth $35,000 after tax credits?

And speaking of statistics, here’s the Cadillac section of GM’s January sales report, as snipped from The Truth About Cars:

I knew the XLR had been marked for extinction because of low sales, but I had no idea they were this low. Minus one? That’s even below the point where you can make it up in volume.

A pissing match between Nissan and General Motors? Oh, what fun. Here’s the background:

Back in October, General Motors began airing a series of commercials based around the Chevrolet Volt’s then-new tagline: “More Car Than Electric.” The commercials that later aired for Chevy’s plug-in took a subtle dig at pure electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, while attempting to explain the benefits of range-extended technology.

Nissan did not respond until last week, when one of their execs said this in a speech:

As automakers, we have a duty to communicate with clarity to help customers understand today’s technology. If you’re calling your car electric, and it has one of these, you’re only muddling the message.

“These” were a tailpipe and muffler, which the Volt of course has, since it has an actual engine stuck in there among all the electricals.

Then again, the Leaf has a valve cover but no actual valves, so who’s zooming whom?

It seems obvious, if only from the laws of physics, that electric vehicles will have to sacrifice a bit of their range if asked to climb a mountain. What isn’t obvious, at least to me, is how much of that range will be given up.

A comment left by the owner of an electrified Toyota RAV4 at AutoblogGreen (1:25 am, 5 September) quantifies the matter:

These numbers originally came from RAV4-EV FAQ list, although I haven’t tested my RAV4 on big enough hills to verify. They also seem to work eerily well for a Tesla Roadster, despite some significant differences between the cars.

Going up a hill costs you roughly 6.5 miles of range per 1000 feet of elevation.

But, coming down again, you regain 4.5 of those miles through regen. So the net cost once you’ve come down is 2 miles per 1,000 feet of elevation.

Nevertheless, Chevy’s Volt has a “mountain mode” that kicks the range-extension engine on early if you’re expecting to traverse the Continental Divide or something.

And furthermore, it’s not like your average gasmobile is going to be able to make the Pikes Peak run for free.

Yesterday the Twitterverse was filled with snark about the Chevrolet Volt, the best of which was provided by Iowahawk. (“The Electric Government Kool-Aid Battery Acid 40 Mile Trip” is choice, maybe even prime.) I have no doubt that GM can move 10,000 of these in the first year: the last Chevy dealer in Hollywood probably has that many names on a waiting list. But inevitably, there are some things that this car — most contemporary cars, says Jonny Lieberman — won’t do well:

The Mercury also performed one other amazing feat, one that 99.9 percent of other modern cars simply can’t do as well. I went ahead and prepaid for a tank of gas. Meaning that if we returned the Grand Marquis on anything more than an eighth of a tank, they’d be getting both my money and my gas! As it happened, Connecticut experienced record-breaking heat that weekend — 100 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity. So, we left the car idling all day with the A/C set to Max. Whenever any of us felt a heat stroke coming on, we’d simply dip into the near-frozen Grand Marquis for a quick cool down. And this may have been the sun talking, but after a few hours I swear the windows began icing up.

I am heartened by the fact that this took place in New England; had it been in Texas, the Thou Shalt Not Drive Much crowd would have dismissed it as being, well, Texan.

Personal note: My ex used to own a Grand Marquis, but traded it for a Ford Five Hundred, which line became the new Taurus. Why, yes, she was born in Texas. Why do you ask?

General Motors has announced pricing on the Chevrolet Volt — $41,000 base, before applicable tax credits — and at least some of the analysts find this off-putting. For example:

“I’m not sure the Volt is going to be a volume vehicle,” said George Magliano, director of automotive industry forecasting for North America at IHS Global Insight. “The technology still isn’t there to make them cheap. At the end of the day, the consumer pays a hefty premium to make a statement.”

And when they say “premium”, by gum, they mean premium:

[I]f you check out GM’s just-released standard equipment sheet … you’ll find that the Volt’s gasoline range extender requires premium fuel.

Generally, you’re not going to use that much of it — inside the Volt’s 40-mile (or so) range, you’re supposedly not going to use any of it — but one particular subgroup of green-machine buyers (the technical term is cheapskates) is going to find this teetering on the very edge of acceptable, just on general principle.