Last week, Edmunds Inside Line reported that 2012 year-to-date sales figures reveal that the Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric vehicle is outselling the Corvette sports car.
Its first full year of production, a total of 7,057 Volt vehicles have been delivered to customers from January through May 2012. Comparatively, Chevrolet has moved 5,547 Corvettes in the same period of time.
Admittedly, stacking the two vehicles against one another is a bit irrelevant. The Volt is still a fresh GM offering while the Corvette has grown quite long in the tooth and will soon get redesigned. What's more, the Corvette is a high performance sports car while the Volt is intended as a "conventional" passenger vehicle.
Despite Inside Line's unbalanced comparison, the latest sales data clearly conveys a message of growing acceptance for the Volt sedan and alternative energy vehicles.
Just earlier this year, former Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich criticized the Chevy Volt for its lack of cargo space for a gun rack. Republican Mitt Romney also called it "an idea whose time has not come." Perhaps most critical of all, American Tradition Partnership Inc., a conservative group, referred to Volts as "exploding Obamamobiles."
Frustrated, GM CEO Dan Akerson said during a Congressional hearing on the Volt in January, "Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag. And that, sadly, is what the Volt has become."
Now, given the growing reception of GM's technical flagship, Dan Akerson would be pleased to see the consumers still recognize that the Volt is an electrically charged, rather than politically charged, product.
