Despite $700 million dollars in development costs and taxpayer subsidies of $250,000 per vehicle, Chevrolet is selling very few Chevy Volts, Seton Motley of News Busters reports today in an eye-opening column.
The federal government and various state governments repeatedly bill taxpayers for a litany of “can’t miss” automobile technologies that repeatedly end in failure. Remember California’s hydrogen highway? How about the Bush administration’s own wasted investments in unrealistic hydrogen technologies? Taxpayer dollars pour into hybrid vehicles that rarely save enough money in fuel costs to justify their additional expense (let alone their additional environmental damage). Now we have the Chevy Volt as the latest black hole for taxpayer subsidies.
If a technology makes sense, it will succeed with or without government subsidies and mandates. On the other hand, no amount of government subsidies or mandates can ever make a failure technology beneficial for society.