Hacker News Reader

To be fair, American taxpayers have been subsidizing the Toyota Prius for years too. Why the Volt costs so much is beyond me - the technologies should be reasonably mature by now. But GM has to head in this direction. They can't just build shitty SUVs and crossovers.

View on HN

Why is the totally electric Nissan Leaf only $32,780? Under ideal conditions it can get 130+ miles to a charge [1] implying it uses better and/or more batteries than the Volt.

The trim and finish must be much better on the Volt considering how expensive batteries are and how relatively cheap gasoline engines are. Or am I missing something here?

1: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20008319-48.html

It doesn't have the gasoline engine. First off, gasoline engines are not as cheap as you think they are in automobile configuration. There is a big difference between what you buy for a lawn mower and what they put in the Volt. Plus you have a lot more arrangement issues related to stuffing more crap into the same sized box. It takes a lot of man hours to design and build something like that.

The Volt website does seem to imply that it comes well speced. Navigation and 30gb music storage seem to be standard. By comparison a similar speced Camry hybrid is between 30-33k

Reply on news.ycombinator.com