Chevy Volt a flop?--One year report

It's official--USA Today and the Washington Post both list the Chevy Volt among the flops of 2011.  And of course, Fox is unrelenting in its snide and biased coverage of the Volt.  So what's the reality?

The big publicized item is that Chevy sold 7,671 Volts in calendar year 2011, which is short of the 10,000 vehicles Chevy said they would produce in 2011.  On the other hand Chevy sold 1,529 Volts in December, which would put them on pace to sell a lot more than 10,000 in 2012.  Also, the media tends to play down the Consurmer Report's survey that found that Volt has the highest owner's satisfaction of any current car in production (those Volt owners must be crazy!)

Since I just completed one year of Volt ownership, I checked in with my salesperson, Jim Moran, of F.H. Dailey Chevrolet in San Leandro, CA.  He said his Volt sales are flat right now because people in California are waiting for the new, carpool-lane-approved, version of the Volt to come out in March.  He has "no doubt" that sales will take off significantly at that point.  He also said that it looks like the new Volt will qualify for the $1,500 California tax credit, but he wasn't positive on that point (I'll check on this).  He also pointed out that the Volt is not offering any rebates--i.e. it sells at the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price, which indicates that the demand is there.

I also asked him about customer satisfaction.  He said that people are really excited when they buy the Volt, but they are even more excited after a few months (like me).  He tells buyers, "You'll really enjoy driving the Volt," and it is the truth.

For the record, we put 12,711 miles on our Volt since buying it on January 11, 2011.  We used 129 gallons of gas for an average of 99 mpg.  Interestingly, that is very close to the EPA estimate of 93 mpg for the Volt.  Our mpg average was brought down by two trips to San Diego and one trip to Las Vegas (we live in Oakland).  Driving just around the SF Bay Area, we traveled 8,036 miles and used 30 gallons of gas, for 266 mpg.  So that's the beauty of the Volt--it uses almost no gas for daily use, but you can also drive it out of town on vacation, and it gets decent mileage on the road as well, about 37 mpg.  Plus we've had good luck plugging it in at motels, with the manager's permission, and I plugged it in at my mother-in-law's place in San Diego, so our road trips (4,675 miles) were not just on gas, giving us a road average of 47 mpg.  For the whole year, we traveled about 7,900 miles on electricity and 4,800 miles on gas--i.e. 62% on electricity.

Coming soon:  Our one year's summary of our solar panel's electric production and the cost of solar power & electric cars.  (Preview--the numbers look good!)