If you are a GM diehard or a Chevy Volt fanboy, I suggest you cover your ears and start humming loudly to yourselves. CNN Money recently featured an article from Fortune magazine’s Motorworld declaring the upcoming Toyota Prius Plug-in hybrid a better buy and a better car than Chevy’s range-extended electric vehicle. Shock, gasp, horror, blasphemy etc.
To quote Motorworld senior editor Alex Taylor III: “[The Prius Plug-in is] more efficient and less expensive than the Volt, and Toyota actually stands the possibility of making a profit on it — something General Motors concedes it can’t do with the Volt.”
It’s all very pro-Prius / anti-Volt, though why we can’t all just be pro-hybrid or anti-hybrid and leave corporate politics out of it I can’t say. It’s probably less to do with Volt vs. Prius and more to do with U.S.A. vs. Japan and that weird form of patriotism / jingoism both nations seem to employ in equal measure.
Mr. Taylor makes his arguments with the following statistics:
The Volt does 34 mpg combined; the Prius Plug-in 50. The Volt takes ten hours to recharge from a standard household socket; the Prius Plug-in only three. The cheapest Volt you can buy at the moment costs US$41,000; the Prius Plug-in is expected to cost around US$30,000. GM has sold 2,184 Volts in the last twelve months; Toyota has sold 7,000 non-plug-in Priora in May alone.
Ipso facto: Prius beats Volt, Japan beats America and all you haterz can suck it (or words to that affect – Mr. Taylor’s reporting isn’t as “colourful” as my own). Though what do I know: my nation’s (Australia) only native hybrid, the aXess Petrol Electric Low Emissions Vehicle (LEV) has been consigned to a museum in Victoria since 2003.
So now it’s our readers’ turn. What are your thoughts or rhetoric on the question of Prius Plug-in vs. Volt? Is this a question that can be answered by statistics alone or does it need a proper road test to decide the true winner? The floor is yours…
By Tristan Hankins
PHOTO GALLERY
