Corporate Integrity Project

General Motors seems to be really good at winning awards for its vehicles. The Chevy Silverado just took home the North American Truck of the Year Award at the Detroit Auto Show. The truck also was just embarrassingly recalled due to a potential fire hazard. Unfortunately for GM, the bad news outweighs the good as awards do not always result in increased sales. Just look at the award-winning Chevy Volt as an example.

Like the Silverado, the 2011 Volt was a recipient of the North American Car of the Year Award. In fact, it seems that the Volt has won more awards than Wilbur, the Prize-Winning Pig from the children’s tale, Charlotte’s Web. But winning awards did not make the Volt appealing to mainstream consumers as sales have never lived up to the hype. And while the Silverado may literally be off to a blazing start, figuratively speaking sales … Read More ➡

The final tallies for 2013 sales are in for the Chevy Volt and its little sister, the Chevy Spark EV. The results are ugly.

While the Volt relies on both a gas engine and electric power, the Spark is actually an electric-only vehicle, assumedly designed to compete with the all-electric Nissan Leaf which had sales of 22,610 for the year. The Spark EV did not compete well, with sales for 2013 coming in at only 589 for the seven months in which it was offered. Chevy Volt sales for the year also disappointed, coming in at 23,094 and down from 2012 sales. The Volt’s sales drop came during a year when overall US car sales rose about 8%.

Back in November of 2012, new General Motors CEO, Mary Barra, hyped the Chevy Spark EV and proclaimed that GM would focus on such plug-in electric vehicles in the future. If this … Read More ➡

In a sudden, unexpected burst of concern about how mandates of renewable energy harm its low-income customers, a Duke Energy executive testified Tuesday that aspects of the government-imposed schemes (mostly welcomed by public utilities) cost far more than they save, and said they are net job losers.

The admission, by Duke’s president for North Carolina (the company’s home state), came during a hearing of a state legislative commission on energy. The specific policy targeted by Paul Newton was the practice of net metering, in which individual homeowners who have installed solar panels are able to sell their electricity to a utility’s grid at the same full kilowatt-hour price that it is delivered to them from the grid.

“While net metering customers use the same utility infrastructure as any other customer,” said Newton, “they pay a significantly lower utility bill due to the full retail rate credits they receive for the … Read More ➡

A recent study by fleetcarma.com unveils yet another drawback of General Motors’ much-hyped Chevy Volt. It appears that the environmentally-conscientious, affluent owners of the vehicles who drive in cold weather will get about half of the electric range, on average, of those who drive in warmer climates.

Fleetcarma charted real-world data displaying an average electric range of approximately 20 miles for Volts driven during temperatures of about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. The owners of President Obama’s favorite car who were under the impression that they would be helping Mother Earth by saving less than one gallon of gas a day at the expense of taxpayers also should be aware of the fact that the Volt needed to burn gas at conditions of under 25 degrees, further negating the supposed green benefits of the car.

The Volt’s range improved to an average of 40 to 45 miles at temperatures of 65 to … Read More ➡

Last year at this time NLPC reviewed 2012 as “The Year of Taxpayer ‘Green’ Waste,” and that description applied to 2013 as well. But additional trends of government opaqueness and inattention to safety and security – often related to stimulus-funded programs and their corporate beneficiaries – were also revealed.

EPA, Dept. of Energy Secretive About Communications

As President Obama began his second term, watchdogs of the administration’s environmental (EPA, Dept. of Interior) and energy (Department of Energy) cabinet spaces discovered that officials maintained secret email accounts to conduct government business out of public view. Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute uncovered a fake identity maintained by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson while researching his book The Liberal War on Transparency. The effort to access her messages and those of other officials has been protracted.

EPA began producing records in January from Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” email account … Read More ➡

There’s that uncomfortable juxtaposition of words again: “Tesla” and “fire.”

This time was quite an accomplishment by the electric automaker’s publicity department: they kept the Irvine, Calif. garage fire quiet for over a month. The secrecy expired on the November 15 incident when the Orange County Fire Authority attributed the incident to the EV’s re-powering set-up, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

“The fire occurred as a result of an electrical failure in the charging system for an electric vehicle,” the report said, while stating the cause of the fire is unclear. “The most probable cause of this fire is a high resistance connection at the wall socket or the Universal Mobile Connector from the Tesla charging system” which was plugged into a 240-volt wall socket, the report said.

CEO Elon Musk (pictured with President Obama) and his PR mavens have been putting out image “fires” … Read More ➡

Yesterday, I confronted outgoing General Motors CEO Dan Akerson, the speaker at a National Press Club luncheon. At a press conference beforehand, and through the first question at the conclusion of his remarks, I requested that GM repay taxpayers the $10 billion in direct GM bailout costs.

Akerson’s refusal dominated much of the media coverage of the event. This was clearly not the story line that Akerson intended.  In short, we happily stepped all over his message that the bailout is a success and that GM is back.

The USA Today/Detroit Free Press story is headlined. “GM’s CEO rejects repaying Feds for bailout losses…” Drudge linked to it. The Associated Press story centers around Akerson’s reasons for not repaying the government. If the comments by readers at various newspapers are any indication, we touched a nerve.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attended my press conference and penned a sneering critique … Read More ➡