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"         With no particular attempt at electrical humor, I note that few upcoming cars have sparked more consumer interest than the . Its claimed 40 miles of EV operation between plug-ins and 300 more in extended-range mode have gotten lots of hype. (Remember last year&amp;#039;s claimed 230 mpg? Read on.) But what&amp;#039;s its real mileage? When will it be available? And what&amp;#039;ll you get for the price?   Answers to these have been gleaned through surmise, analysis and craftily doled doses of GM news. The hottest and latest, from the 2010 Plug-In Conference &amp;amp;amp; Exposition in San Jose, California, is the Volt&amp;#039;s official Manufacturer&amp;#039;s Suggested Retail Price: $41,000. As with other EV/PHEV announcements, subtraction of a federal $7500 tax credit is quickly appended (or, as some do, blatantly offered as the bottom line). A 36-month Volt lease will run $350/month, with $2500 due at signing. The car will have standard navigation system and 5 years of OnStar concierge service.   But does the federal $7500 spiff bring the out-the-door price of your Volt (or, for that matter, your Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV or Tesla Roadster) down by this amount? No. The benefit comes when you file your federal income tax return sometime during the year after purchase. Despite wording I&amp;#039;ve seen, don&amp;#039;t confuse the $7500 with a &amp;quot;rebate;&amp;quot; it&amp;#039;s a tax credit. Also unknown, given EV buzz and limited numbers, is what sort of dealer markup might be expected.   Whichever computation you prefer, to put it in perspective the Volt&amp;#039;s MSRP is $41,000/$33,500 post tax. The is $33,720/$26,220. On the other hand, except for EV bling, it&amp;#039;s foolish to compare these two cars. One is a pure EV; the other, to use GM&amp;#039;s latest term, is an &amp;quot;Electric-First&amp;quot; plug-in series hybrid.   GM says it expects the Volt to be on sale by November of this year, with orders taken from July 27 at . It plans to produce some 10,000 Volts by the end of 2011 and expand this to 30,000 in 2012. In analysis, these anticipated sales are not big numbers, particularly for what&amp;#039;s been touted as a paradigm shift in personal mobility. By contrast, over the past four years the Toyota Prius has averaged almost 13,000 sales each month. On the other hand, the first-generation Prius didn&amp;#039;t exactly go off like a rocket: Sales for its first two years, 2000 and 2001, amounted to 5562 and 15,556, respectively.   With regard to battery longevity, GM recently announced that the Volt&amp;#039;s 16-kWh lithium-ion pack will carry a warranty of 100,000 miles or eight years, whichever comes first. This is similar to conventional hybrid warranties, but still noteworthy in that the Volt&amp;#039;s Electric-First configuration puts more stress on its battery pack. Also, this will be the first significant use of lithium-ion technology in an automotive application. Only the and (this first, a mild hybrid; the second, a microhybrid) and Tesla&amp;#039;s micro-production of just a tad more than 1000 cars have used lithium thus far.   Fuel economy of the Volt&amp;#039;s 1.4-liter 4-cylinder engine remains an open question, in that the government is still working out how to assess plug-in technology. As noted here at roadandtrack.com, this is a non-trivial problem, only obfuscated last year by GM&amp;#039;s claim of the Volt&amp;#039;s 230 mpg.   Briefly, gasoline consumption of a plug-in depends profoundly on how much the car travels in &amp;quot;charge-depletion&amp;quot; mode, loosely when it&amp;#039;s running EV, and how much of the trip is in &amp;quot;charge-sustaining&amp;quot; mode, i.e., once its gasoline engine comes into play. A while back, I demonstrated that any value from makes sense for the Volt, depending on how often it&amp;#039;s plugged in and how much it&amp;#039;s driven in between. More than ever before, the phrase &amp;quot;Your mileage may differ&amp;quot; will apply with the Volt and other plug-ins.   What&amp;#039;s more, until we have opportunity to drive a Volt in the real world, even that 40 miles of Electric-First is only a laboratory assessment, based on what might or might not be anything resembling reality.   Last, I&amp;#039;m a bit surprised that the Volt&amp;#039;s November introduction has yet to be supported by any significant journalistic experience with the car. A while back, Shaun Bailey, our Detroit Editor at the time, drove a prototype\u2014in EV mode only. And I&amp;#039;ve read a sole piece, in The New York Times, describing a brief\u2014and not altogether flattering\u2014drive of the Volt in its extended-range transition mode. GM engineers acknowledge that the real challenge is when the car&amp;#039;s Electric-First miles are exhausted and you want it to shift transparently to gasoline-generated electricity.   San Jose Conference participants have a controlled-drive opportunity on a closed course. By contrast, we&amp;#039;ve driven other pure EVs and plug-ins extensively during their developmental stages. For instance, characteristics of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric city car and Toyota Prius Plug-In, neither appearing any sooner in our market than the Volt, are not exactly mysteries to us. To cite only two examples of many: We&amp;#039;ve from San Francisco to Sacramento\u2014via a Vacaville quick charge. We&amp;#039;ve driven the Toyota Prius Plug-In at more than 70 mph in its EV mode. And we have other more extensive driving experiences of these two cars coming soon both here and in print R&amp;amp;amp;T. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a16099/chevrolet-volt-electric-first-to-cost-41k/>