General Motor’s Vice President Ed Peper announced yesterday at the Washington Auto Show that the D.C. area would be joining San Francisco as the second city in the nation to feature GM’s most prized electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. As Mr. Peper noted, it looks like the the Chevy Volt, “Is truly coming to life.”
Interestingly enough, GM doesn’t expect to make much money off of the cars themselves. With a price tag of $30,000-$40,000, no one is suggesting the Volt will outsell its competitors; not at least until the price of batteries goes down. Mass-production will help bring prices down, but until then, GM is busy readying the metro area’s market for electric vehicles in some interesting ways, like working with state officials to allow Volt drivers a place in carpool lanes and building power-up stations at places of employment.
San Francisco seemed like the obvious first choice for GM to introduce the Volt last year, but D.C. came as a bit of a surprise to me. As Britta Gross puts it, San Francisco, “Raised their hand before we even made the offer.” The Bay Area is one of the largest markets in the U.S., one that has shown much interest in clean fuels over the past few decades, and so it would seem only logical that they should become the first city to host the Volt. D.C., however, strikes me as a slightly more peculiar choice. Economically, it’s is less than a third the size of it’s west-coast counterpart, with a fairly strong hybrid market and an environmentally friendly citizenship, but one not much more so than many others across the country. Instead, the choice seems to have political savvy written all over it. The auto industry hasn’t yet forgotten about their public embarrassment at the hands of the senate this fall, and might be attempting to make good by bringing their clean cars to the metro area, making it all the easier for big-wigs on the hill to be constantly reminded of GM’s commitment to electric vehicles. That’s all fine and well-lets just hope they start producing the Volt elsewhere, too.
