Chevrolet volt full#

Chevrolet volt full#

In 2012, its first full year on sale, 5300 examples found homes across Europe. Here in the UK, we got two versions of the Volt this Chevrolet-badged model and Vauxhall's sister vehicle, the Ampera, the latter's more UK-specific badge and marketing proving more popular. Newspapers ran stories of vast unsold inventories of Volts across the US and after some price slashing, registrations slowly picked up. That 40-mile figure was key because three-quarters of commuters drive less than that distance on a daily basis. The Volt was meant to challenge Toyota and its Prius hybrid and to spike the guns of industry upstart Tesla Motors. Then-GM CEO Rick Wagoner had stated in 2006 that the car industry needed to reduce its oil dependency, and in the background then-GM executive Bob Lutz was marshalling a team to develop a car that could travel 40 miles on electricity alone. The Chevrolet Volt was developed from General Motors' EV-1 electric vehicle program to the prototype concept that first saw motor show duty in early 2007. Modelsĥdr hatchback (1.4 petrol/electric hybrid) History Does it make a better used buy than it ever did a new one? Read on to find out. It ought to have been a sales winner but it wasn't.

Here was a vehicle that you could happily run after plugging it into the mains and charging the batteries, but when those batteries went flat, you had the belt and braces approach of a 1.4-litre petrol engine to ensure that you never found yourself stranded. Chevrolet realised it didn't have to be this way with its Volt electric car. Potential buyers picture their daughters borrowing an electric car, getting stranded somewhere and then promptly buy a diesel instead. They're worried about running out of juice on some wet and windy moorland or in a bad neighbourhood of town. The big reason most UK car buyers haven't switched to electric vehicles is pretty simple to grasp. Leave aside the arguments about cost effectiveness for a moment.