Chevy Volt price cut!

Still an overhyped boondoggle that nobody with any sense will touch with a 10 food barge pole.

Slow selling? Why do you people hate the environment?!?

Yay!

Just a measely few more thousand to drop, and it would almost compete with a base model Honda Civic!

Somebody call Congress to log into their eTrade account and buy more GM stock, pronto!

I'll stick to a used Mini Cooper, thnx.

Currently getting 28+MPG in my Scoobydu Impreza. The meter flirted with 30+ yesterday.

Your $80,000,000,000 hard at work saving you $5,000 on a Volt!

Praise Obama!

You mean the GM stock that is now selling above it's initial IPO?

Please tell me you're fucking joking.

GM says their cost of production is ~$35k per car and they say they'll have that cost down to ~$25k in the second generation which means the Volt will be profitable a full generation ahead of the Toyota Prius which didn't make any money until the 3rd generation. I'd say that's pretty good.

I'll stick with my '85 Buick, thank you very much.

I'll stick with my '77 Buick Electra 225 with its Olds 403 and about 11 miles per gallon.

I'd say anything short of GM being bankrupt and forced to restructure is bad.

But, like a pregnant girlfriend, you can't unscrew it now that it's knocked up. Oh well.

That's like discussing the utter destruction of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Army and someone quipping "You mean the one with the new Abrams tanks?"

I'm happy with my '93 Saturn SL2.

Did you already buy one or are you planning to buy one? They do seem to be extremely popular with young women in their 20's and 30's around here. It lets them have European snob appeal (which is always a plus in a car) with the low operating costs of an economy car. Plus it really does look better than a comparable Toyota or Ford product.

We'll probably have to trade in a car sometime in the next few years, but I have no interest in a pure electric car regardless of price. The batteries are supposed to be nuclear bombs full of Hitlers and Biebers from the environment's POV.

Doesn't matter. Fossil fuels are the fashionable enemy, big oil is their villainous face, and nothing matters more than the EM PEE GEES.

Well, scientifically speaking, fossil fuels are not the most energy dense form of fuel. Why we dick around with electric so much I'm not sure, as we'd have to improve electric batteries by about 2,500% to get the energy density of gasoline. Compare that with hydrogen, which has an energy density at 70mPa of 267% that of gasoline, or 6833% that of the most efficient battery. Add in the fact that you have a charging time associated with electric cars, and I really don't see the use of an electric only car.

Now the Volt isn't terrible, as it bridges that gap between electric and fossil fuels by being able to use an internal combustion engine to charge it, but it's still a long way from hydrogen, and hydrogen is what we need to be investing in.

Why do I get the feeling that a President Alberta would have never sent us to the moon?

So, I'm confused. Is Alberta mocking the very idea of an alternative-energy vehicle, because he's so in love with gasoline?

Or is he mocking it because he also wants to mock, by extension, the dirty hippies he thinks are the only ones who support such a concept?

And why does Alberta fail to indict the lack of support for creating the infrastructure that would be needed to truly see this idea succeed? Does he own stock in Big Oil? Does he enjoy the wildly fluctuating prices at the pump?

On the other hand, Mercedes has built an all-electric version of the Mercedes SLS AMG called the E-CELL that will leave the fossil fuel version in its dust.

The bad news is that it has a very limited range.

Again, the sane and obvious thing to do, IMO, is to build a diesel hybrid--maybe even set it up so it will run on biodiesel. Then you get the great gas mileage of a diesel combined with the great gas mileage of a hybrid combined with technically not even needing gas.

And the electric drive would level out the power demands, meaning you wouldn't get the black smoke on acceleration--even if modern diesels made black smoke on acceleration. They've been doing it with trains since oh, the '30s or so. I can't figure out why no one has done it with a car. Well I guess I can. Cost. And they don't think there'd be enough demand.

http://www.plugincars.com/first-drive-volkswagen-xl1-plug-diesel-hybrid-127594.html

VW's diesel hybrid averages 100 km per liter of fuel.

So that's, what, five miles per gallon? What's this metric shit? Get rid of it!

I'm convinced that CS would have to measured in "kilodummies".

You have a Buick? Buick fan club?

his name is Otis.

Not yet...I'm about to be gone from the area soon for God only knows how long. But since I was overseas, the price for used Minis have hit the 8k to 12k range, which I could have at least a third of that for a down payment.

I gotta be careful, cuz a lot of the ones before '05 had transmission problems with the manual models, though.

They're making you do a sea duty? Like a West Pack or something?

I'll stick to my Honda Accord ... the thing is practically indestructible. It's old enough to vote and I've still only ever had to do minor repairs.

The V-6 on those old Buicks is dead reliable, sure, it's a gas thirsty dinosaur which was originally designed in the late 1950's but it received lots of updates and after half a century of production just about every reliability issue imaginable had been sorted out.

That said, Buick still makes designs I don't like even if they do work.

My shit has a 307 ci V8, sucka!!