Limp I hear your passion but
Limp I hear your passion but as a conservative Republican and a Volt owner your "facts" are just off. I have a 51 mile round trip commute and I'm entirely off of gas during the week since I get to plug in at work. So it is obviously not a "gas powered locomotive" as you indicate. If you go to voltstats.net you will see that a lot of people are driving the Volt 70 percent, 80 percent, even 90 percent plus in EV mode.
As far as range goes you should check out what real owners are saying instead of people that had the car for a day or two and drive it in such a manner to really shake it out. During the spring, summer and fall months I was averaging in the mid to high 40 miles of EV range. Several times I actually got over 50 miles of pure EV range. Now that it is cold (albeit a mild winter here in Virginia) I'm in the low to mid 30's range. Follow other real owners out there at gm-volt.com (not GM affiliated) and you can read the pro's and actual cons of the Volt (as opposed to the made up stuff that is prominent among fellow conservatives).
As far as the $250,000 subsidy goes.... think about it this way. The new Dallas Cowboy stadium was approximately $1.2 billion. If somebody made an argument that said it was an utter flop and was a poor financial decision because that equates to $150 million for each Cowboy home game in the first season and there is no way that the Cowboys can expect the 100,000 paying customers to pay $150 million collectively for each game, you would laugh at somebody for making such a poorly reasoned argument. Among some of the reasons why it is so wrong is that a) you don't need to recoup all the money in the first year and b) there are other revenue streams (concerts, college games, motorcycle races, monster truck rallies, etc.) that all rent out the location and generate revenue. Same thing goes for the Volt. The $3 billion "subsidy" that GM got from the feds covered many things among them money to help with the plant that builds the Volt. Other cars are also built at this same Hamtramck plant and yet that "think tank" conveniently assigned all the "subsidy" to the Volt. And then they only assigned it to the first several months of production of the Volt when the plant will function for decades to come. It's easy to see why the hypothetical Cowboy argument is a joke and once you understand some basic facts about how that one group come up with the $250k per Volt subsidy number you begin to realize how completely dishonest and yes, moronic, the argument was. As a conservative I'm ashamed to be associated with groups like that. And I would add that Morano has no ethical problems with repeating something he knows to be false. What does that say about him and Fox for continuing to say the same lie?
Finally, the Volt is pretty expensive. It will not gain wide acceptance at the current price but neither will comparably priced Audi's, Lexus or BMWs. That is the main competition for the Volt and there is little doubt in my mind that for $35k (my net price) I would much rather have the Volt than one of those cars. There is a reason it won so many awards. I just wish more conservatives would test drive one and make up there own minds instead of listening to the propaganda about this car.