Chevrolet Volt: The Plug-In Washington Bet On and GM Buried

In mid-January 2016, Reuters counted about 400,000 electric cars sold in the United States. The White House had promised a million by 2015.

The Chevrolet Volt was supposed to carry that promise. In February 2011 the Department of Energy listed 15,000 Volts of production capacity for that year and 120,000 a year from 2012 through 2015. GM sold 7,671 in 2011 and 23,461 in 2012.

Then, with the Volt still the best-selling plug-in in the country, GM killed it. This is the story of the plug-in that became a political football, a bailout symbol and a lab-test target. And of the one thing nobody in Washington or Detroit wants to look at: the people who bought it plugged it in.

The goal, and the arithmetic

Reuters says President Obama set the one-million-plug-ins goal in 2008, when gasoline averaged nearly $4 a gallon. The Truth About Cars quotes it from the January 2011 State of the Union, where he said America would be “the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” Either way, the target had a date and a number.

A February 2011 DOE report said production capacity would not be the bottleneck. Manufacturers had announced more than 1.2 million units of electric-drive capacity through 2015. Of those, the report’s table lists the Volt at 15,000 for 2011 and 120,000 a year for 2012 to 2015. The report says plainly that these are capacity figures from manufacturer announcements and media reports, not sales forecasts. Remember that, because it matters for what comes next.

What came next: Volt sales in the US were 7,671 in 2011, 23,461 in 2012, 23,094 in 2013, 18,805 in 2014 and 15,393 in 2015, per Wikipedia’s sales table. In March 2012 the administration’s progress report moved the goal from a million cars on the road to having the battery and component capacity in place by 2015, according to The Truth About Cars. The same piece said Volt production had just been halted for the third time, with unsold cars piling up at dealers.

Capacity is not demand. The DOE never said otherwise. But the Volt was the face of the plan, and the face had a sales problem.

The bailout car

GM filed for bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. Obama called the filing part of a plan that would give the company “a chance to rise again.” The Truth About Cars calls the Volt, which Bob Lutz had pushed into existence, a symbol of GM’s bailout.

Lutz joined GM in 2001 to run product development, per CBS. He admired the Tesla Roadster and wanted an all-electric concept for the 2007 Detroit show. Engineer Jon Lauckner told him an all-electric family car would need an enormous battery to get decent range. His alternative: a battery big enough for the daily drive, plus a small gas engine to make electricity for longer trips. GM picked the E-Flex system, later called Voltec, and the name Volt in October 2006, according to Wikipedia. The concept appeared in Detroit in January 2007, with a 40-mile electric target.

Inside GM there were doubters. Lithium-ion had never been used in a high-volume car, CBS says. By early February 2007, per CBS, the board had encouraged a production car after the reaction to the show.

What the sticker said

The EPA label arrived in November 2010. The 2011 Volt: 93 MPGe on electricity, 37 mpg on gasoline alone, 60 MPGe combined, 35 miles of electric range.

Put the numbers where they belong. Lutz had talked in 2007 about 50 mpg from the gas engine, as The Truth About Cars reported. The label said 37. A 2010 Toyota Prius was rated 51 city and 48 highway, per an electricvehicleforums review. On gasoline, the Volt used more than a Prius. On electricity, the math is different, and the Volt’s 93 MPGe applies to those miles.

Then the fuel. Chevrolet said the generator required premium gasoline, with regular acceptable only in an emergency, per Cars.com.

And then the 230. In August 2009 GM announced the Volt would get 230 mpg. It was a city-cycle figure under a draft EPA methodology. A GM spokesman said it was “based on city cycles” and the company wasn’t yet explaining in detail. The EPA said it had not tested a Volt and could not confirm GM’s numbers. Autoblog reported that neither GM nor the EPA explained the math; PopSci guessed it counted only gasoline, but couldn’t confirm. The 230 and the 37 do not measure the same thing: one mixes electric city miles under a draft method, the other is gasoline use after the usable battery is gone. What you can fairly say is that GM put a number on a car before the number was certified.

The price came on July 27, 2010: $41,000 including a $720 destination charge, according to Green Car Reports. A fully loaded car stickered at $44,600. The $7,500 federal tax credit brought the effective price to $33,500. The three-year lease was $350 a month with $2,500 down, and the credit went to the lessor, not the driver.

Its rival, the Nissan Leaf, also reached dealers that December, per InsideEVs. It listed at $32,780, about $25,280 after the credit. Nissan promised up to 100 miles; the EPA rated it at 73 and 99 MPGe, per the AP. The Leaf also qualified for a $5,000 California rebate that the Volt did not.

Side by side on the spec sheet: the 2011 Volt weighed 3,781 pounds and had 111 kW and a 16 kWh pack for 35 electric miles. The 2011 Leaf weighed 3,354 pounds, with 80 kW (107 hp) and 24 kWh for 73 miles. Over 400 pounds more, a gas engine and half the electric range, in exchange for never getting stranded.

Production began on November 30, 2010, and the first retail delivery was December 15. The second car went to auction with a $50,000 opening bid. Rick Hendrick bought it for $225,000. Sales for 2010: 326.

What was under the floor

The Volt’s electric motor made 111 kW (149 hp) and 273 lb-ft. A 1.4-liter gas engine of 84 hp (63 kW) drove a 55 kW generator. The pack was 16 kWh, of which 10.4 were used, 288 cells in all, and weighed 435 pounds. The EV1‘s lead-acid pack, per Wikipedia, weighed 1,310.

GM called it an extended-range electric vehicle and avoided the word hybrid. The SAE classifies it as a plug-in hybrid. And there is a detail few people mention: depending on the mode and operating conditions, the gas engine could add mechanical power to the wheels through the transmission’s planetary gearset. GM says this improved high-speed efficiency by 10 to 15 percent, per Wikipedia. So the Volt was not a pure series hybrid. A true one would be the 1900 Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus, with two gas engines running two generators that fed motors in the front wheel hubs and no mechanical link at all, according to The Drive, a car from the forgotten first age of the electric car. The plug-and-gas idea had been tried before too: the Woods Dual Power in 1916 and the Audi Duo in 1989. The true series EREV came from Germany in 2013: the BMW i3 REx, with a 647 cc scooter twin that only made electricity.

One more footnote. Per Wikipedia’s history of plug-in hybrids, a 1997 Delphi project to turn an EV1 into a plug-in hybrid was canceled. The idea was on the table thirteen years before the Volt.

2011: the awards, the fire and Capitol Hill

The Volt won almost everything in 2011: Motor Trend Car of the Year, North American Car of the Year and Green Car of the Year, per Wikipedia. GM wanted to build about 10,000 that year. It sold 7,671. The Leaf, in the same period, sold nearly 10,000, per NBC News.

Then came the fire. On May 12, 2011, in a NHTSA side-pole crash test with a female dummy, the structure intruded into the battery and ruptured the battery coolant system. The car was parked at the test facility and burned between June 3 and 6, about three weeks later, along with three other vehicles. NHTSA opened a formal investigation in November 2011; in lab tests on battery packs, one caught fire on November 24 and another on December 12. GM modified about 12,400 cars with reinforced side structure and a coolant sensor. By January 5, 2012, about 250 owners had asked for loaners or buybacks. On January 20, 2012, NHTSA closed its case: “no discernible defect trend.” Five days later Rep. Jim Jordan’s subcommittee held a hearing on the timing of the investigation. According to NBC, only about a dozen owners took GM’s buyback offer.

Sales sank: 603 in January 2012, 1,023 in February. GM stopped production for five weeks, March 19 to April 23, with 1,300 workers idled, per NBC. The 45,000 target for 2012 was dropped.

At that January 25 hearing, Jordan said government subsidies amounted to between $50,000 and $250,000 for each Volt sold. The figure came from a Mackinac Center study dated December 21, 2011. It added the $7,500 federal credit for the first 200,000 buyers of GM electric cars ($1.5 billion), a $105.9 million Department of Energy grant to a Brownstown plant, a $106 million state credit for the Detroit-Hamtramck factory and aid to battery maker A123 that GM says has nothing to do with the Volt. A GM spokesman said the study wasn’t “even in the same area code” as accuracy. PolitiFact rated the claim Half True: real study, questionable money, calculated on roughly 6,000 sales, and it left out local government help.

Meanwhile in Spain: six plates in eight months

Europe got the Volt twice: as the Chevrolet Volt and as its twin, the Opel Ampera. Spain shows how far that went. Opel announced a Spanish price from 42,900 euros in November 2010, per Diariomotor, and the car reached dealers in January 2012 with about 60 advance orders, 80 percent of them fleets. The base price ended up at 47,680 euros. Spain’s 2013 incentive paid 3,500 euros for a plug-in with 40 to 90 km of electric range, which is exactly where the Ampera sat. It didn’t help: from January through August 2013, Spain registered 5 Opel Amperas and 1 Chevrolet Volt, per Tecmovia. That September Opel cut 9,380 euros off the price in one go, to 38,300. Diariomotor’s July 2014 obituary called it “the chronicle of a failure foretold.” America’s best-selling plug-in ever; in Spain, you could count them on one hand.

What owners actually did

Reuss would say GM wasn’t going to spend money on extra stuff customers may not need. Here is what the Department of Energy’s EV Project data said about the customers.

The Idaho National Laboratory’s fourth-quarter 2013 report covered 1,611 Volts. In 71.1 percent of the distance they drove, they were in electric mode. On days the cars were driven, they were plugged in 1.5 times a day. GM, citing an independent study of the same project covering July through December 2013, said 81.4 percent of 1,198,114 trips were completed without the gasoline generator starting.

These were project participants, not every owner. But those Volts were plugged in.

The second generation, and the end

The second-generation Volt reached the US and Canada in October 2015 as a 2016 model. Battery: 18.4 kWh. Electric range: 53 miles, 106 MPGe, and 42 mpg on gasoline alone, with a 1.5-liter engine that now took regular. Seats for five. US sales peaked at 24,739 in 2016, then fell to 20,349 in 2017 and 18,306 in 2018.

On November 26, 2018, GM announced that Detroit-Hamtramck would be left “unallocated” in a restructuring that hit five North American plants, and that the Volt was finished. GM’s stated reasons: buyers shifting to trucks, crossovers and SUVs. Mary Barra said GM was acting “while the company and the economy are strong.” InsideEVs reported that month that the Volt was America’s best-selling plug-in ever: 148,556 through October, ahead of the Leaf (126,747) and the Tesla Model S (about 138,000).

In January 2019, GM’s president Mark Reuss said GM would no longer pursue hybrids: “You can’t spend money to force the customer to carry around extra stuff they may not need.” The last Volt was built on February 15, 2019, two weeks earlier than announced, per a news report syndicated on local TV sites. US sales over the car’s life, per Wikipedia: 157,054.

The factory did fine. In October 2020 GM renamed it Factory ZERO and announced $2.2 billion for the GMC Hummer EV. The Volt vanished; the plant got another life.

And now they want plug-ins back

In January 2024, per The Drive, Barra said GM would bring plug-in hybrid technology to “select vehicles in North America.” In May 2024 she told The Detroit News that the first would reach dealers in 2027, the same year new tailpipe rules arrive, per InsideEVs, which noted she didn’t hide that this was mostly a response to regulation. Early in 2026, per GM Authority, Barra told the Automotive Press Association that GM was working on a hybrid and plug-in strategy for the US, and that, “traditionally at least,” plug-ins “were the only hybrids that actually counted.” InsideEVs reports that at an event of that association she said “most people don’t plug them in.”

The numbers that don’t match

• When the million-car goal was set. 2008 per Reuters; January 2011 State of the Union per The Truth About Cars.
• Volt development budget. About $900 million per a syndicated report on the plant closure; $1 billion per CBS in 2007.
• Subsidy per car. $50,000 to $250,000 per the Mackinac Center and Rep. Jordan; Half True per PolitiFact.

The numbers used here are EPA’s, GM’s and those repeated by several sources. What could not be confirmed is left out.

Washington wrote the check, Detroit wrote the press release

And then both walked away from the car.

The DOE counted capacity and called it a path to a million. GM claimed 230 mpg before the EPA had touched the car. It charged $41,000 for a car that wanted premium, next to a $32,780 Leaf. And still, in November 2018, it was the best-selling plug-in America had ever had.

What carried that car was the idea. Electric for the daily drive, no stranding on the long trip. Owners understood it before GM did.

GM killed it in 2019 with Reuss saying the company wouldn’t spend money on extra stuff. Now it promises plug-ins for 2027, and the CEO says most people don’t plug them in. Whose data is she reading?

Unplug and enjoy.

Images: IFCAR (public domain) · NAParish (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz (CC BY-SA 3.0) · NHTSA (public domain) · William Oliver (CC BY 2.5), via Wikimedia Commons.