MAKES NO SENSE - AT 9:08 A.M. ET:  You know, I was wondering when someone would write an article like this.  You're probably all aware that General Motors, or Washington Motors, or the People's Car Company, or whatever it's called, is coming out with a car called the Volt.  Available next year.  Runs entirely on electric power, with a small gasoline engine providing only charging of the electric motor.

Incredible gas mileage.  Off the charts.

The only problem is, it will cost $40,000.  Yes, yes, there are federal subsidies under which all of us will help pay for Volt buyers to buy the car - our forced charity is a little grating - but it's still way more expensive than the kind of cars that someone looking for gasoline savings would buy.

Eric Peters, at American Spectator, does the math, and the numbers don't add up:

We live in incoherent times, but maybe someone can explain it to me: How does a $40,000 "economy" car make economic sense?

It doesn't.

Does it compute? Well, let's see... .

For the sake of discussion, we'll take GM's 230 mpg claim at face value. This figure is about four times the published mileage of the 2010 Toyota Prius (50 mpg, average). But the Prius costs just over half as much ($22k). So, the Volt buyer would have to "work off" the approximate $18,000 difference ($12,000 or so, if you subtract the proposed $7,500 government subsidy).

Twelve grand buys one helluva lot of gas -- even at $3 per gallon. Four thousand gallons, to be precise. If whatever you are driving now gets an average of 25 mpg (half what the Prius gets) that 4,000 gallons would keep you going for 160,000 miles.

That is a long time to wait to break even... .

A very long time.  And by the time you've gone 160,000 miles, the wheels are probably falling off, the car is long out of warranty, and the second, third, and fourth generation technologies are making your car look ridiculous.

Even leaving aside the operating costs, how many people who are really concerned about gas mileage (that is, about the expense of a car) are in a position (or desire) to spend $40,000 on a vehicle? By definition, if you are spending that kind of money on a car, you either don't care much about gas mileage -- or don't really have to care much about it.

And...

We are, truly, through the looking gas.

Forty grand to "save gas" -- with the government carjacking taxpayers (via the IRS) who are smart enough to live within their means by driving cars that are either low-cost or paid-for in order to provide a $7,500 bounty to those who either can't do supermarket math or just like the idea of a government-subsidized Ed Begley, Jr./Leo DiCaprio techno-toy they can toodle around in and tout how "green" they're being.

COMMENT:  I'd love to see how many Volts GM will sell, and to whom.  When the cars turn up in Aspen for some annual conference on global warming, you know we'll have gone completely mad.

August 18, 2009