Project Voltwatch!

Mickey Kaus Columnist
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The Mystery of the Volt: Where Will They All Go? General Motors is sticking by its prediction that it will sell 10,000 electric/hybrid Chevy Volts by the end of the year. Only 5,000 had been through October, meaning GM has to double that amount in just the final two months of the year.  Until now, Volt production seems to have been wildly outstripping actual sales.  But GM CEO Dan Akerson says sales are “starting to hit the pace,”  some reporters claim the Volt is “hot,” and the company has made a big show of allowing dealers to sell off their demo models, allegedly to supply the now-insatiable “customer demand.”  …

So where will all these Volts actually go? There seem to be three possibilities:

1) Akerson is right. The Volt is a “home run” and they’ll all soon be in the hands of satisfied customers!

 2) They’ll be recorded as “sold” even though they’re sitting unwanted on dealer lots. “Sold” in GM parlance means sold to a dealer, who then may or may not succeed in reselling the car to an actual paying customer.

 3) They’ll be pushed out to corporate fleets, as big businesses seek to please the Obama administration by doing their part to help bailed-out GM unload this overpriced showpiece pioneer our nations’ green future.  Call this the corporatist solution. It’s been suggested by my Daily Caller colleague Neil Munro.

To help solve the mystery, and maintain TheDC‘s traditional vigilance against corporatist advance, kausfiles is launching Project Voltwatch, in which we ask readers to report any Volts they see with business logos on the side. We will then be able to contact these companies and see how many Volts they bought. Please send your sightings to me or to Neil Munro (whose idea this was), and put “Voltwatch” in the heading. …

P.S.: Note that the Obama administration’s energy department was counting on 120,000 in Volt sales next year, even though GM has already cut production to 60,000, only 45,000 of which are to be sold in the U.S..

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Mickey Kaus