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Comment by felipemnoa | Hacker News Reader

>>Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking.

That to me sounds like a decent number. I guess they were selling them at a loss.

For comparison consider that Tesla is selling about that many cars in a month, or that GM sold over 2,000,000 cars last year, so the Volt was only about 1% of their volume. Little sad though because it had some truly innovative engineering.

I was interested in the Volt myself but after sitting in one decided it was too small. It is essentially a Chevy Cruze body with the Voltec drivetrain. I was banging my head into the roof getting in, while on a similarly small vehicle (Prius) I had ample room. The Volt it sleeker and much better on the eyes than a Prius, but I need my daily driver to have good utility.

I find it interesting that you think that the Prius is a small vehicle. To me it seems that the Prius is on the large end of mid-sized vehicles. A small car to me would be something like a Daihatsu Cuore or a VW Lupo.

Could be chatting with a taller person.

Maybe it was the Prius-C or a first gen. Otherwise agree. The non-C Prius has interior passenger dimensions similar to a Camry.

They also never advertised it at all. The only people who knew about them either researched them or heard about them from word of mouth.

The total absense of advertising for a vehicle that so many people loved has always reeked of lack of commitment from one side of the house.

That doesn’t even factor in how Chevy dealerships would actively try to talk you out of them.

Maybe they got negative commissions or couldn’t gouge on maintenance.

I heard about it when it first came out and frankly the name itself was a turnoff. I had no idea that they were selling so many. Maybe with some better branding it could have done better in the market.

I'm always interested in the issues around naming things. It is a tricky science that I wish I were better at.

So I wonder if you could elaborate on what made the name a turnoff?

Thanks!

Volt, sounds like a cheap knockoff of Tesla. That was the emotional response I got from it. I imagined that if they could not come up with a more original or cooler name then their car was probably like that too.

I could almost see their reasoning for naming it volt: They figured that the Tesla company used that name because of Nikola Tesla, I guess they decided they too should use another name related to electricity, the volt (cue applause at their brilliance). It seemed very lazy to me.

I don't know about the "rest of the world" but I would be bet that, in December 2010, when the Volt started selling in the US, far more Americans knew that the word "Volt" related to electricity than had heard of Tesla and knew that that word related to electricity.

For me, the bigger issue was that the name - to me - implied that it was an electric car, not a hybrid, so it felt like unsubstantiated marketing spin.

They did do an initial advertising blitz but it was just terrible. I do not understand why they couldn’t do better commercials

The one part of this that I feel like I understand is that if you buy this vehicle you've effectively signed up for twice the maintenance expense. While I feel this was a brilliant step in the direction of stop gap between gas and electric vehicles; I could never bring myself to pull the trigger.

Why? Yes, there are more components than either a pure ICE or pure EV, but that doesn't translate to "twice the maintenance expense".

In my experience (we own a Pacifica PHEV), a PHEV means less expense than a 100% ICE vehicle, but more than a pure EV.

Is it twice the expense? Probably not. Plug in hybrids are simply the worst of both worlds. You still need an engine and everything that goes with it, and your all electric range is anemic.

Why would I buy a Volt when I could buy a Model 3, a Leaf, or another EV? Electricity is cheap, no need for fuel or oil changes, and the driving experience is better (at least in Teslas with quick 0-60 times). You also are still eligible for the federal tax credit at its full amount for EVs where the manufacturer hasn’t sold 200k EVs yet.

The Volt died for the same reason the SR71 did: it was no longer needed.

Disclaimer: Tesla owner

> Why would I buy a Volt when I could buy a Model 3, a Leaf, or another EV?

Because you could commute on pure battery, but still drive anywhere an ICE can go without having to plan your route around charging stations and kill time while your vehicle charges. Seems like a reasonable use case to me...

Tesla sells ~25k vehicles a month to customers (enough that they’ve cannablized sales from BMW in California) who don’t mind stopping at fast DC charging stations. The market has spoken (wrt EV vs PHEV).

While the Volt had a niche, it seems it wasn’t competitive enough versus newer market competitors.

...and around 475k ICE vehicles a month are sold in the US.

PHEVs seem like a nice option for the people who find that an EV is not suitable for their long distance travel, but would like something environmentally friendly for their short distance needs, and do not want to have two cars.

Buy a Prius and carbon offsets until EVs advance further if you’re absolutely set on not wanting to fast charge when traveling and use a liquid fuel instead. Don’t demand a niche product that no one wants to build.

I don't need to spend hours charging my car if I want to go beyond my commute. I simply go to a normal gas station and my Volt effectively functions as a hybrid. With gas, Volts have a 300 mile range.

Also if my charger somehow fails in the middle of the night, I can still drive to work without issues.

Because most other EVs other than Tesla lack range, while you can still take a Volt on a long trip without having to plan around finding a special charging station.

It’s the single best solution on the market to cutting fuel usage by about 90%, being fun to drive and not having all the headaches that go with range anxiety / locating available charging stations.

The real question is why you’d by an all electric when the Volt was an option? They’re totally impractical for anything other than a 2nd car.

Because you’d buy a Prius (a wildly successful vehicle) instead of a PHEV (and still realize a drastic reduction in gasoline usage over the life of the vehicle, while still realizing a high level of reliability). There is a reason the Prius was often put into service as a taxi.

I’ve driven my Tesla from the west coast to the east coast with minimal hassle (using only Superchargers), and with newer EVs having longer range and fast charging stations being deployed rapidly (Electrify America), I argue that the idea that an all electric vehicle is impractical except as a second vehicle is an antiquated notion.

The Volt has an excellent track record for reliability, easily better than that of the Model 3, and earlier Model S (haven’t kept up with if they ever sorted out the issues from back when I wanted to buy one)

It also has better fit and finish despite costing less.

The Volt was an all around better car than the Model S I test drove and that’s why I have one (and two other cars in a similar price bracket so that is clear it wasn’t a price issue).

This is a little off-topic but your comment resurfaced my sentiment on the matter... I firmly believe Tesla is making cars that survive on halo effect more than substance and am extremely excited to see what other manufacturers come up with in the future.

It also has better fit and finish despite costing less.

The Volt was an all around better car than the Model S I test drove and that’s why I have one (and two other cars in a similar price bracket so that is clear it wasn’t a price issue).

Also, to understand the benefits of the gas engine look at it like this.

Presuming you’re not one of the owners using/abusing supercharging to replace a home charger, the Volt ICE is like a supercharger.

You only use it on long trips or to top off when you’re a little low and want to get rid of “range anxiety”

The Prius drives like a powered down vehicle, which it is. The Volt drives like a little sports car. You put it in Sport mode and that thing will fly.

Prius isn’t even in the same conversation...which is why the total lack of marketing of the Volt is the biggest problem it’s had. I’ve driven both, there is no comparison.

Really depends on your perspective. To me a plug in hybrid seems like the best of both worlds. Enough range to do my daily commute all electric, but the ability to go on a longer road trip without having to worry about where a charging station is located.

> The one part of this that I feel like I understand is that if you buy this vehicle you've effectively signed up for twice the maintenance expense.

Then I would challenge your understanding.

That combustion motor 1) is not running anywhere near as much as a normal combustion engine, 2) has no mechanical transmission to go bad and 3) can be tuned for a much narrower range of RPMs than a normal engine.

Removing a mechanical transmission is huge. Everything else is upside.

It doesn't work out to twice the maintenance. In the Volt, then gas engine is only used when you need to take a longer than normal trip. Even then, it is mainly a series generator that runs at a leisurely rev range to supply power to the EV system. It is not stressed the way a normal engine is.

Maintenance schedules for the engine are extended as a result. Oil changes, for instance, are automatically tracked and I only had to do one oil change after about 2 years.

I'm coming up on 3 years with a gen 2 Volt and it's been very reliable and more fun to drive than the ICE vehicle that it replaced.

The Volt has proven to be pretty reliable, as far as Chevys go. The Prius is widely regarded as the most reliable car you can buy. So, while it might seem logical that the more complex car would be more troublesome, it doesn't play out that way.

At >50,000km on my Volt and have had to do no maintenance other than changing back and forth between winter and summer tires.

No oil changes, no fluids, nothing. Averaging 1.2l/100km

You're simply wrong.

The government committed to buy a certain amount of Volts and so did General Electric. It's estimated that there are government subsidies of $250,000 per car.

https://jalopnik.com/report-every-chevy-volt-has-over-250-00...

The last paragraph of the article you linked:

>So, yeah. The maximum price-per-vehicle for a Chevy Volt is $250,000 per vehicle — right now — if you make all the most pessimistic assumptions and the government hands over all their grant/subsidy money to companies who don't meet the goals built into the programs.

And this particular article was written in 2011.

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