Those are just some of the words that Snopes uses to describe some of the “facts” that can be found in a spam email that is circulating about how absolutely awful the Chevrolet Volt is. Using a recent and flawed Fox News “review” of the Volt as a starting point, the email claims that the Volt costs 74 cents a mile to drive and takes 14.5 hours to go 270 miles. This is based on the crazy ideas that someone is paying $1.16 per kWh for their electricity and that you need to fill up the battery when you fill up the gas tank. Regular readers will note instantly that somethings fishy there, but chain emails don’t exactly work on the educated, which is why Snopes does its debunking.
The email must be penetrating deeply into people’s inboxes, since GM felt the need to put up its own demystification post on Chevrolet Voltage. There, GM’s Rob Peterson writes, “Recently, there have been some numbers circulating online about the cost to drive the Volt that are flat wrong – either the person doesn’t understand how the Volt works or they are paying roughly ten times the national average for electricity (in which case, they have other issues).”
GM may not have designed the Volt to be a political punching bag, but that’s what the car has become, as the original email makes clear (again, using faulty logic): “So Obama wants us to pay 3 times as much for a car that costs more than 7 times as much to run and takes 3 times as long to drive across country. REALLY? No wonder GM is having trouble selling the Volt!”
REALLY? No, not really. GM is not selling as many Volts as the company publicly hoped for – and just restarted production after a two-month shut-down – but the reasons cited in the email are not in any way responsible.
