If the camel is a horse designed by committee, then the Chevy Volt is a car designed by a bureaucrat with a federal budget. Toady, the Associated Press reports that General Motors issued a recall for the entire Chevy Volt fleet. The story reads:
General Motors is advising Volt owners to return their electric cars to dealers for repairs that will better protect the vehicles’ batteries, which have caught fire after crash tests.
The repairs— which would fix 8,000 Volts on U.S. roads and another 4,400 still for sale — fall under a “customer service campaign,” which is similar to a safety recall but allows GM to avoid the bad publicity and federal monitoring that come with a recall.
Recalls happen, but they are typically done at the expense of the business and not the taxpayer. The Mackinac Center released a study compiling all state and federal taxpayer giveaways for the creation and production of the Chevy Volt. In sum, the taxpayer contributed $250,000 for each Chevy Volt. For this reason, the Chevy Volt is such an interesting example of failed central economic planning and should serve as a cautionary tale for politicians with ambitious green dreams; however, I’m not optimistic because we were warned over 100 years ago by Thomas Edison.
