Volt | Fausta's Blog

March 3, 2012 By Fausta

Volt goes down in flames

General Motors has told 1,300 employees at its Detroit Hamtramck that they will be temporarily laid off for five weeks as the company halts production of the Chevrolet Volt and its European counterpart, the Opel Ampera.

“Even with sales up in February over January, we are still seeking to align our production with demand,” said GM spokesman Chris Lee.

“Seeking to align our production with demand” = nobody wants them so we can’t keep making them, in spite of the fact that the total amount of state and federal subsidies for each Chevy Volt sold is as much as $256,824 per vehicle.

Maybe Obama’s still on time to buy one, there must still be plenty of Volts on the dealers’ lots,

UPDATE
Barack Obama blew more money on the Chevy Volt than the entire annual GDP of Belize.

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January 5, 2012 By Fausta

What would be the #3 worst product of the year? UPDATED: ALL VOLTS RECALLED

Drumroll, please!

Yay! The Chevy Volt!

Yessss!
The bland little car that looks like every other forgettable little car in the parking lot, each costs $230,000 of taxpayer subsidies, and gives new meaning to burning rubber when it catches on fire.

Only Netflix’s Qwikster, and A&F’s push-up bra for little girls could top that, but, for my taxpayer bang-for-the-$230,000-bucks, the Volt is #1.

Government Motors: Wasting your money in the most hazardous way.

UPDATE
I left one out,
Obama gets two ‘awards’ for worst product failures of 2011

Obama’s second flop took sixth place.

The booby prize want to the Fiat 500 auto, which administration officials touted when they arranged for Fiat to buy the ailing Chrysler company.

“The car was expected to be a big seller, rivaling BMW’s Mini… [and] Fiat expected to sell 50,000 500s during 2011 in North America,” according to the Yahoo! Finance Top 7 list. However, “Fiat sold fewer than 12,000 [and] sales were so poor that Chrysler Group, which manages the Fiat brand in the United States, ousted U.S. chief Laura Soave this past November,” noted Yahoo.

UPDATE 2:
ALL VOLTS RECALLED!
Chevy Volts Called Back By GM For Battery Fixes

GM is making the repairs after three Volt batteries caught fire following crash tests done by federal safety regulators.

Fire hazard.

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April 19, 2011 By Fausta

Burning Volt, Batman!

The Car for Idiots strikes again, this time going down in flames… twice,
Chevrolet Volt Bursts in Flames. Twice

Strangely enough though, sources say that after the initial fire broke and was put out, the Volt caught fire again, this time, apparently, from where the battery is located.

The mystery is deepened by the fact that before the first fire, the Volt was plugged in, recharging over night (as was the Samurai); in the second fire, however, the plug-in hybrid (what was left of it) was not connected to a power source.

It’s not enough that the steering wheel falls off, it also self-combusts.

Ah, for the days when Ralph Nader was talking about vehicles “unsafe at any speed.” Now we have progressed to just plain unsafe.

Publius Forum has the The GM WeeKann, soon to be unveiled.

Meanwhile, the government is having a fire sale on GM,
U.S. Hurries to Sell GM Stake

A sale within the next several months would almost certainly mean U.S. taxpayers will take a loss on their $50 billion rescue of the Detroit auto maker in 2009.

To break even, the U.S. Treasury would need to sell its remaining stake—about 500 million shares—at $53 apiece. GM closed off 27 cents a share at $29.97 in 4 p.m. trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, hitting a new low since its $33-a-share November initial public offering.
…
At Monday’s price, and taking into account shares sold during the IPO, taxpayers would lose more than $11 billion on the rescue if the government dumped the rest of its stake now.

h/t Steve

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April 12, 2011 By Fausta

GM: $84 billion later, they come up with a car whose steering wheel falls off VIDEO

Getty Images

General Motors is recalling certain Chevrolet Cruze compact cars to make sure their steering wheels were put on tightly.

Chevy Recalls Cruze After A Steering Wheel Falls Off

it happened to at least one driver of a 2011 Chevrolet Cruze compact car last month, and General Motors Corp. is recalling 2,100 of the cars as a result.

While the recall affects a relatively small number of vehicles, it is an unpleasant development for Chevrolet, which has been riding high on the success of its new small car. Chevrolet sold 50,205 Cruzes through the end of March. That’s well short of the 76,821 units Toyota sold of the Cruze’s main rival, the Corolla, but it is ahead of the 37,379 Cobalts Chevy sold in the same period. The Cruze replaced the Cobalt and is supposed to be a departure from that uninspired model.

In documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the car maker said it traced the problem with that particular car to a case in which the wrong wheel was put in a car and replaced later in the assembly process.

GM didn’t think of changing the production process to make sure the machine used to attach the steering wheel can accommodate only the correct one until after the wheel came off this vehicle. The WSJ post has over 700 comments, nearly all negative.

The Lonely Conservative quotes,

Recently GM’s Vice President of U.S. Sales Operations touted the Cruze saying: “Vehicles like the Chevrolet Cruze and Equinox put us in great position to benefit from consumer’s increasing desire for fuel-efficient vehicles.”

Fuel-efficient, but deadly, somewhat like those catalytic-converted Mexican trucks I was talking about today.

TLC has video of the car,

Unsafe at any speed, to use Nader’s words.

Via Memeorandum

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March 1, 2011 By Fausta

How green was my sludge

Low-water toilets make sludge back up public sewer pipes, as the people of San Francisco are finding out,
Low-flow toilets cause a stink in SF

San Francisco’s big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

What to do about the stinking mess? Bleach it!

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite – better known as bleach – to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city’s treated water before it’s dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

In other green news, Consumer Reports doesn’t like the Volt,
Consumer Reports: GM’s Volt ‘doesn’t really make a lot of sense’

Champion believes a hybrid, such as the Toyota Prius, may make more sense for some trips.
“If you drive about 70 miles, a Prius will actually get you more miles per gallon than the Volt does,” Champion said.
But GM has noted that most Americans can avoid using gasoline for most regular commuting with the Volt, while its gasoline engine can allow the freedom to travel farther, if needed.
The magazine has put about 2,500 miles on its Volt. It paid $48,700, including a $5,000 markup by a Chevy dealer.
Champion noted the Volt is about twice as expensive as a Prius.

And that’s only for the sticker price. Don’t forget about the government bailout.

Moving right along the green path, CFL bulbs don’t compare to incandescent ones when it comes to brightness and quality of light, but you probably noticed that already.

Now I can’t wait for the reports a few years from now talking about what measures will be necessary to abate the high levels of mercury from discarded compact fluorescent bulbs.