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Consumer Reports Knocks the Chevy Volt Senseless

The debate surrounding the Chevrolet Volt, centered around the rhetorical question “is it worth it?” entered a new chapter today, after the first results of the tests conducted by quality watchdog Consumer Reports hit the web.

According to the trend-setting magazine, the Volt is, pure and simple, a non-sense of a car. Fun to drive and pretty good when it comes to quality, the model falls short in exactly the area where it was supposed to be the king of the road: range.

"When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn't particularly efficient as an electric vehicle and it's not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy," David Champion, the senior director of Consumer Reports auto testing center, said according to DetNews. "This is going to be a tough sell to the average consumer."

So, how much of a non-sense is the Volt? Well, GM advertises the model as being capable of an all-electric range of 29 to 33 miles on average. When it feels confident and the weather is all sunny and moderate, GM recorded even above 40 miles in electric mode.

Consumer Reports, however, disputes that claim by saying that during the harsh Connecticut winter, the model can only travel 25 to 27 miles.

And the plot thickens. We all know that auto makers pretty much lie when announcing consumption figures. Not literally, but the figures they report can be achieved only in a utopian, perfect world, one that cannot be found on this planet. Probably, the electric range of the Volt announced by GM applies to the rules of the same world, because we all know the performances of electric vehicles drop in cold environments.

Where does that leave us? Consumer Reports says that, in the long run, a Prius would be a better choice for a car than the Volt. "If you drive about 70 miles, a Prius will actually get you more miles per gallon than the Volt does," added Champion, after his testers drove the Volt for 2,500 miles and paid $48,700 for it, nearly double then they would have paid for the Prius.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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