#ChevroletVolt

The Chevrolet Volt should eclipse its 2011 sales total by the end of June, and is apparently on pace to sell 20,000 units this year. It’s also outselling a major Chevrolet nameplate.

While on the Infiniti JX launch event, I met a gentleman who now works with Nissan. He had a number of interesting stories about his tenure at GM, and what it was like to work on the EV1 program, as well as the technology that he swears was the forerunner to the Chevrolet Volt.

It was a good month for the Toyota Prius Plug-In, with the newest plug-in car outselling the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf in April.

Two GM employees suffered injuries at the company’s Warren, Michigan battery research facility following an explosion and a small fire. Emergency crews were called to the scene at 8:45 A.M Wednesday, and found a small fire as well as two injured employees.

The Detroit-Hamtramck plant that builds the Chevrolet Volt will be shut down for three weeks instead of the standard two weeks this summer, and according to GM, that’s just business as usual. Even when it’s not.

General Motors will be replacing the 120-volt charging cords that come with the Chevrolet Volt after one utility company had their cord melt during charging. There have been other anecdotal reports of malfunctioning cords being replaced by General Motors at fan sites like GM-Volt.com

Opel has taken 7,000 pre-orders for the Ampera (aka the Chevrolet Volt), and looks to be on their way to meeting their 10,000 unit goal for 2012.

Chevy Volt – Building a Better Tomorrow from Ben Howe on Vimeo.

Our very own Ed Niedermeyer was on CNN today talking about the Chevrolet Volt, and in honor of his appearance, we present to you a satirical Volt ad that is sure to incite untrue accusations of political bias among TTAC staffers. In other news, vote Lyndon Larouche 2012.

On the back of last year’s win for the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet Volt and Vauxhall/Opel Ampera has won the 2012 European Car of the Year award, beating out the Citroen DS5, Fiat Panda, Ford Focus, Range Rover Evoque, Toyota Yaris and the Volkswagen Up!

General Motors sold 1023 Chevrolet Volts in February of 2012, but production figures totaled 2,347 units. Uh oh.

You heard it yourself. When Obama is out of office, he’ll buy a Chevrolet Volt and drive it himself. The Secret Service, which famously wouldn’t let Obama drive the Volt down the Hamtramck assembly line, generally protects the President for up to 10 years after they leave office – we’d assume that the “no driving” clause applies here. So Obama’s Volt may sit for a long time – hopefully it won’t brick.

Meanwhile, the DoE’s projection of 120,000 Volts produced in 2012 (let alone sold to consumers) still looks a little optimistic. GM just restarted production of the car a few days ago. Their sales target of 45,000 in 2012 has been abandoned after coming 2,300 units short of their 10,000 unit goal in 2011. GM now says that they will adjust “supply to meet demand”.

Bob Lutz took Fox News and other media outlets to task in his latest blog for Forbes, titled “Chevy Volt and the Wrong-Headed Right”, with Lutz taking shots at Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

When Jack Baruth wrote a post about Chevy Sonics being recalled for missing brake pads, some readers thought that TTAC might be cherry picking the recall reports, perhaps because of some institutional prejudices around here. Jack pointed out that recalls are a fairly frequent thing whereas cars shipped without functioning brakes are hopefully a much rarer, and thus newsworthy occurrence. In another newsworthy event, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called on NHTSA, the federal agency that handles things like car and truck recalls, to explain its actions in regard to how it investigated and reported the events surrounding the reported fire in a Chevy Volt that NHTSA had crash tested and flipped over.

Starting in March, the Chevrolet Volt will be eligible to use the HOV lane on California highways. The catch? You have to buy a new Volt to use the carpool lane.

A Chevrolet Volt owner in Ottawa, Ontario has been blocked by his condominium board from charging his Chevrolet Volt – even though he has offered to reimburse the board for the $1 (approximately) in electricity it takes to charge the Volt at local rates.