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Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. It now seems that the same philosophy holds true with government-owned General Motors. About eight months ago some owners of Chevy Volts complained that charging cords were overheating , sometimes to the point of melting. At the time, GM blamed owners, saying the wall outlets were the culprits. We now finally have GM addressing the safety concerns and agreeing to replace charging cords for all 9,500 Volts that have been sold since production began. But in what is becoming a new public relations precedent, the move is not being...

General Motors announced yesterday that it would replace the 120-Volt charging unit provided with every Chevrolet Volt, to provide what GM spokesman Randy Fox called a "more consistent charging experience." Back in July, we reported that some of the charging units provided in Volts were overheating, becoming too hot to touch and in one case, even giving an owner a second-degree burn. Thicker cord Now, after complaints from Volt owners, General Motors has agreed to swap out the unit for a beefed-up unit of the same design. Fox said upgrades to the design include a thicker cord from the unit...

VIDEORepublican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich returned to a favorite target, slamming the Chevrolet Volt as an impractical vehicle, while stumping on the campaign trail in Louisiana Wednesday, three days ahead of that state's primary. "I've tried to explain this psychologically, you can't put a gun rack in a Volt," Gingrich said to supporters in Pineville, La., repeating a line of attack he used in February. Last month, however, one Chevy driver set out to prove the former Speaker wrong by actually building a gun rack into the back of his Volt, which he documented in a video posted to YouTube....

Energy: The economist at the newspaper of record defends the president's energy policy of Solyndra, Chevy Volts and algae while dismissing the oil boom on private lands as a small-town hiccup with no impact on price. New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman asks in a recent column why gas prices are rising if we are in the middle of a domestic oil boom. Doesn't the "drill, baby, drill" crowd claim, he argues, that prices will drop "if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want"? Without our domestic oil boom,...

President Barack Obama says he wants to buy a Chevy Volt when he’s out of office in five years. If getting into a General Motors electric automobile means so much to him, he’d better hope he loses in November. What the president dubbed the “car of the future” in a visit to a Volt plant may not make it to January 2017. The partially government-owned General Motors has suspended production of its government-approved miracle car and temporarily laid off 1,300 workers at a Detroit plant. The halt is the result of a piddling detail lost in the gushers of praise...

Ally Financial seldom gets mentioned when the auto bailouts are discussed. The company was formerly known as GMAC and the 17 billion dollars that taxpayers sunk into the company was crucial for the perceived success at both General Motors and Chrysler . We now learn that Ally Financial has failed a government stress test and, according to Reuters, "fared by far the worst of 19 banks examined." Years back, GMAC changed its name to Ally Financial to dissociate itself from GM. Just changing a name can not negate the fact that the $17,000,000,000 Ally Financial received from taxpayers went...

Fresh off the heels of its European Car of the Year award, the Chevy Volt has been named "Vincentric Best Value in America." You just can't make this stuff up. I didn't know that there were so many awards in the auto industry, but the less that the Volt sells, the more awards it seems to win. After this latest award, it dawned on me that the Chevy Volt is eerily like Wilbur, the prize-winning pig from the classic children's tale, Charlotte's Web. Wilbur was a runt of a pig, destined to go to the slaughter house. He is...

(CNSNews.com) - A new survey shows that rising gasoline prices will force changes in the driving habits of American adults, but only six percent of them said they plan to buy a hybrid/energy-efficient vehicle to alleviate pain at the pump. The online survey, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of CouponCabin from March 6-8, found that 3 in 4 adults in this country said they are changing their driving habits: -- 61 percent plan to drive less overall to save money -- 9 percent plan to carpool -- 8 percent plan to use public transportation -- 6 percent plan to...

Anyone following the intriguing Chevy Volt story has seen the internet headlines trumpeting the blog by General Motors' Bob Lutz in which he blasts Bill O'Reilly, Fox News and what he calls, "the rabid, sadly misinformed right." It remains a mystery as to why GM would take a politicized stance and join up with those on the left that want to complicate the story on the poor sales for the heavily subsidized and even more heavily hyped Chevy Volt and somehow connect the lack of demand to a Republican political conspiracy. Before moving on to the Lutz offensive defense,...

Industrial Policy: A leading consumer product testing firm takes one of the administration's dream green cars for a spin and had to call a gasoline-powered flatbed truck to tow the lemon away. At least it can go from zero to $529 million in stimulus dollars in nothing flat. When the testers at Consumer Reports took it for a test drive, not only was the $107,850 dream car unable to complete the evaluation, but also it had to be towed away, a visible metaphor for the Obama administration's green energy failures. In a test conducted last Wednesday by Consumer Reports magazine,...

The recent lowering of lease costs for the Chevy Volt led me to think about the amount of money General Motors or Ally Financial (also taxpayer-owned) was going to lose when the quickly depreciating leased vehicles begin to be returned. I then recognized another egregious waste of taxpayer money being spent to support the struggling car. Taxpayers are paying the tax credits, which go to the lessor of the Volt (most likely Ally Financial), to place Volts on the road for a limited period of time. The typical Chevy Volt lease will be for a term of 36 months. The...

March is an important month in the ongoing saga of President Obama’s abject policy failures. First, Chevrolet announced that it would temporarily cease production of the president’s much-touted car for the green economy, the Chevy Volt. Second, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the state-led challenge to the president’s health care legislation. And while “ObamaCar” and ObamaCare may seem like unrelated topics, in this case they have at least three elements in common. Both were sold as a key to creating jobs and economic growth. Only last year the president predicted that there would be 1 million electric cars on...

The Chevrolet Volt is everything that is wrong with Washington on four wheels, and investors (that’s you and me) should be furious. Wrong #1 : The Volt should be re-named the Vote. Who can forget that Super Bowl ad, with the pseudo-assembly line of Volts rolling through Hamtramck, Michigan, and the voice overlay that “this isn’t the car we wanted to build; it’s the car America had to build…from the heart of Detroit to the help [sic] of the country.” How true—corporate welfare on wheels, buying votes in a state vital to the President’s re-election. There is simply no...

These guys at Government Motors just continue to outdo themselves. Just as Chevy Volt owners are getting over being called idiots by the head of Audi, GM comes up with an ad that lends credence to the accusation. A supposed Volt owner tells how she loves her car because her friends think it looks like a spaceship and it saves a "crapload" of money. I laid off the original story of the Audi head saying Volts were for idiots. The .001 percenters who bought Volts have a right to spend their money as they see fit and I gave...

In a speech before the Daimler Trucks North America manufacturing plant in Charlotte, N.C. today, the president delivered his answer to rising gas prices: He wants to increase the $7,500 tax credit for alternative-energy vehicles to $10,000, earmark $1 billion to reward cities that provide infrastructure for such vehicles, earmark an additional $650 million for a research program to increase the range and decrease the price of the vehicles, and repeal $4 billion of tax incentives for oil and gas companies.Why? Here is a telltale paragraph from The New York Times: The creditÂ’s enhanced value would bring the purchase price...

The Detroit News reports that Mitt Romney wants a reexamination of the General Motors' bankruptcy proceedings. Mr. Romney is quoted as stating, "I think it's important for us to go back and look at what happened and take apart this bankruptcy process. See to what extent the finger of politics was placed on the scales of justice and see if we can't be more fair to the people involved in this process." I agree with the sentiment, but I do have to ask, where were the Republicans on this issue over two years ago? Three years ago I served...

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.” Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory. Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate....

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.” Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory. Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate....

(Editor’s note: This article has been updated with a reaction from a General Motor's official.)Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.Hohman looked at total state and federal assistance offered for the development and production of the Chevy Volt, General Motors’ plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. His analysis included 18 government deals that included loans, rebates, grants and tax credits. The amount...

GM has just announced it will be idling the plant (and the 1,300 workers at that plant) where the "game changing" Chevy Volt electric car is -- uh, was -- built. GM says it's only temporary -- until they figure out how to "align production with demand." It could be a long wait for those workers. GM projected production of 45,000 Volts this year. That may have been just a little bright-sided. Last year, 7,621 of them found buyers (about 2,400 fewer than the 10,000 GM had hoped for). This past month, just over 1,000 of the $40,000 sort-of electric...