Wired bashes Chevrolet Volt bashers

From Wired Autopia's Chuck Squatriglia: Listen up all you GM haters and Volt bashers: The Chevrolet Volt rocks and General Motors deserves tremendous credit for building it. We cannot say this emphatically enough. The Volt effectively bridges internal combustion and battery-electric propulsion to provide many of the best attributes of each.

Spare us your lame arguments about "Government Motors" forcing this car on us. The Volt was in development long before the Bush administration bailed out the auto industry. Quit rehashing the tired "GM lied" debate over whether the Volt is an electric or a plug-in hybrid.

The bottom line is you'll do much, if not all, of your daily driving without burning gasoline. Stop griping about the $41,000 (pre-federal tax credit) price, already. Yes, it's expensive. We're talking about first-generation technology here, folks. Could you afford a 53-inch flat-screen TV when they first came out? No, you could not. Be patient.

One more thing. Don't give us that line about government subsidies for electrics unless you're equally outraged by the many billions in subsidies, tax breaks and other handouts the petroleum industry gets each year. You can't have it both ways.

What stuns us most about the vitriol is the people who say the Volt sucks or it is a failure without having actually driven it. We've driven the Volt at various stages of its development and come away impressed at every turn.

This is a remarkably well-engineered car with excellent fit-and-finish and a boatload of features. There's a reason the Volt is racking up car-of-the-year awards and it won the Green Car of the Year award. It sure as hell isn't because it sucks.