Curbing my Volt Enthusiasm?

 As you'll read in a First Test of Chevy's overwhelming new Volt, my knowledge with a automobile suggests GM has in truth delivered a automobile it promised. It appears to be a technological moonshot that's achieving its lofty objectives. But I'm an aged guy with a long-ish mental recall that's been intuiting a little deja vu via Chevrolet's carefully orchestrated rollout of a Volt.

I remember another Chevy which betrothed to rewrite a rulebook with a key of tons of new technology. That automobile was additionally hyped for months as well as months previously so which by a time a press was presented with a real deal a unveiling was perceived as a Second Coming. It boasted a revolutionary engine as well as a 95-percent robotized physique emporium which helped enable a never prior to heard of line-production rate of 100 or more cars per hour. Even a shipping process was to be unique as well as revolutionary--the cars were engineered so which no fluids would trickle out when ecstatic vertically standing upon their noses in specifically written rail cars which could accommodate thirty cars instead of 18.

Have we guessed a automobile yet? It was a 1971 Chevy Vega. A small automobile braggadocio big-car values as well as main road cruising ability which was written to, once as well as for all, expostulate those annoying foreign cars back in to a oceans across which they'd come. Motor Trend crowned it Car of a Year in 1971 as well as lived to regret which decision. Commenters in a Volt First Drive forum are already rooting loudly for Chevy's plug-in hybrid wonder to take a calipers for 2011 next month. Is this automobile expected to create a same arrange of regret?

I unequivocally want to think not. When we study what went wrong during a Vega's troubled rehearsal (John DeLorean tells all in "On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors"), it's clear to see which which automobile was destined for trouble. Larger-than-life personalities gathering bad decisions which forced illogical designs upon engineers who knew them to be illogical though were forced to try to have a fixed pattern viable.

With a Volt, a larger-than-life celebrity (Bob Lutz) might have helped launch a program, as well as might have influenced a argumentative preference to use such a large battery container (driving a price of a module way up), though a fundamental pattern is receptive to advice -- distant improved in fact than Toyota's for a plug-in hybrid -- and  a tight-knit group which has brought a concept to prolongation has been pulling tough in a same citation via a Volt's fairly dense growth period. Another encouraging fact is which funding for this module was never interrupted via a corporation's new failure unpleasantness. Indeed a limited time with a automobile denounced no fatal flaws. (Then again, we suppose a initial Vega drives didn't evince any melting engines or exile fender decay either.)

Still, all evidence seems to suggest which General Motors remembers a Vega too, as well as has doubled down to safeguard those mistakes aren't repeated. Here's anticipating -- for all a sakes -- they unequivocally have gotten it right this time.