Originally posted by eagleeye2
This car is basicly useless. Unless you wanna BBQ your wife you might only clog streets with your sunday afternoon show off. I feel sorry for GM but they are clearly 7-8 years behind the Germans in hybrid tech.

General Motors is advising Volt owners to return their electric cars to dealers for repairs that will lower the risk of battery fires. Eligible for the free repairs, announced Thursday, are 8,000 Volts on U.S. roads and another 4,400 still for sale

NHTSA critics have accused the agency of going easy on GM because the government still owns 26.5 percent of the company’s shares and the Obama administration has urged more sales of electric cars to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

NHTSA agreed to allow “safety campaigns” instead of recalls in the 1990s under pressure from the auto industry, Ditlow said. There is little difference between the two other than that NHTSA monitors recalls and makes sure more owners take their cars to dealers to have the repairs made, he says. “Safety campaigns are a kinder, gentler form of a recall,” he says. “It’s trying to put a good name on a safety recall.”

GM nearly ran out of cash and needed a $49.5 billion government bailout to survive bankruptcy protection in 2009.

GM sold 7,671 Volts last year, falling short of its goal of 10,000. Its main competitor, Nissan’s Leaf, sold 9,674. The Volt had its best month ever in December with 1,529 sales, but a GM executive conceded this week that the battery fires may have affected sales.

At first, GM blamed NHTSA for the June fire, saying it should have drained the battery to prevent any fires after the test. But the company quickly retreated and said it never told NHTSA to drain the battery. GM executives also said there was no formal procedure in place to drain batteries after crashes involving owners.

In December, GM CEO Dan Akerson said the company would buy back Volts from any owner who wasn’t satisfied.

So far, about 250 of the owners have asked for a loaner or a buyback.

Originally posted by FutureThinker
I remember commenting about this car in another thread here on ATS, I said this car was a piece of crap, but I didn't know how bad it really was.
As a technician, I can tell you this car will end up as one of the 10 worst cars made, ever !.
This is a disgrace and a slap in the face to the taxpayers.

Some Chevrolet dealers are turning down Volts that General Motors wants to ship to them, a potential stumbling block as GM looks to accelerate sales of the plug-in hybrid.

For example, consider the New York City market. Last month, GM allocated 104 Volts to 14 dealerships in the area, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dealers took just 31 of them, the lowest take rate for any Chevy model in that market last month. That group of dealers ordered more than 90 percent of the other vehicles they were eligible to take, the source said.

In Clovis, Calif., meanwhile, Brett Hedrick, dealer principal at Hedrick's Chevrolet, sold 10 Volts last year. But in December and January he turned down all six Volts allocated to him under GM's "turn-and-earn" system, which distributes vehicles based on past sales volumes and inventory levels.

GM's "thinking we need six more Volts is just crazy," Hedrick says. "We've never sold more than two in a month." Hedrick says he usually takes just about every vehicle that GM allocates to him.

GM spokesman Rob Peterson confirmed that "dealer ordering is down" for the Volt.