The main problem with the Volt (and Tesla) is the price. Any plug-in (or all electric) will have to come in under 30K or it won’t have mass appeal (like the Prius).

I personally would prefer a plug-in hybrid to all electric. I do make the occasional trip of 500+ miles. And I don’t want a car that has that limit. I think many consumers feel this way.

I think a plug-in hybrid that averages 40+mpg and costs no more than 30K would be a winner. Make it about the size of a Ford Edge, and you will have a blockbuster. Easier said than done, yes. But just stating the realities of the consumer mind as I see them. I just know the Volt will fail, mainly because of price, and the industry will say, “See? Consumers don’t want them. We’re going to continue to build the old gas hogs”.

One presumes all these mobile 400 ampere flows will have Enviro-whiner degaussing spoilers to protect overhead pidgeons from unknown hazards re magnetic navigation. Save the pigeons!

These car guys just lie and lie.. Chrysler and GM said “Oh everything will be rosy if you just give us billions in bailout and now we know they fully knew they were going to go bankrupt, they were just hyping it up in order to grab some more cash, Tesla is the same but more. So let me get this right, the Tesla head guy paid GQ magazine to write an article about how arrogant he is and ditched his smart wife and left her with 5 kids for a teenie bopper that he was cheating with and announced a battery deal that was really just an R&D contract and has multiple lawsuits against them by other companies, and may have a car that causes cancer from battery EMF and has created a pool of past staff that write endless blogs about how bad they are and then raised prices because they had no idea how to build a car and lied to the City of San Jose and their customers and applied for their only source of funds without even reading the rules that told them in advance they should never try to build a factory and is trying to sell an insanely expensive car in a depression while every investor has deeply reviewed them and turned them down and Musk won’t even put his money in (of which he has hundreds of millions) and all of their technology has now been superseded by Fisker, Bright and others… ?? and Tesla employees are so ready to jump ship that Musk spies on them with fake internal emails… hmmmmmm

Cheating:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/21/profile-of-paypal-an.html

Battery Deal:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/08/16/some-complete-speculation-on-the-daimler-tesla-deal/

Lawsuits:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/380125/tesla-finds-the-electric-car-business-is-a-litigious-one

Cancer:
http://www.saxton.org/tom_saxton/2009/01/tesla-price-increase.html

Bad karma from the start:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/tesla-s-musk-calls-cofounder-the-worst-individual-i-ve-ever-worked-with-

More problems:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/more-sparks-from-tesla/

http://greenfuelsforecast.com/ArticleDetails.php?articleID=683

http://erith1.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/tesla-single-handedly-sets-back-the-electric-vehicle-industry-by-10-years/

Pissing off the customers:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/tesla-to-angry-customers-its-all-about-us/