USMC Captain Bob Lutz (ret.) climbs back into the cockpit to defend the Chevrolet Volt.
Former Marine pilot Bob Lutz has strafed some of the best-known conservative pundits for their criticism of the Chevrolet Volt, including radio host Rush Limbaugh and Fox New commentator Bill O’Reilly – the latter deserving what Lutz called “the Oscar for totally irresponsible journalism.”
The ever-outspoken Lutz, a former General Motors Vice Chairman, broke silence in the wake of last week’s hearings stemming from several fires that followed federal crash tests of the Volt and its battery pack. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration briefly opened and then quickly closed an investigation into the plug-in hybrid after General Motors identified the likely source of the problem and announced steps to reduce the likelihood of fires.
But lawmakers used the January 25th hearing as a political set piece to raise questions about the 2009 federal bailout of General Motors and alleged improprieties by the administration’s top auto safety executive. Though those themes gained little traction during the hearings the Volt has become a popular whipping boy among conservative pundits like Limbaugh and O’Reilly, the latter making it sound like the battery cars routinely catch fire during a segment with TV pundit Lou Dobbs.
“That simply isn’t the case,” said Lutz, in a column for Forbes. In a subsequent interview with the Detroit Free Press, he lamented the lack of “ethics” and “fairness” the conservative commentators demonstrated.
GM CEO Dan Akerson was one of those testifying before Congress last week, lamenting during his appearance that the “collateral damage” of having the Chevy Volt politicized — its reputation tarnished in the process – will hurt the automaker’s ambitious sales goals.
But Akerson, an active donor to the GOP, and other GM executives avoided speaking out more directly about the issue. Lutz – credited with developing the concept behind the Volt – showed no reluctance, even though he recently signed on as a General Motors consultant.
The long-time automotive executive’s stand is particularly significant considering he describes himself as a political conservative who has generated plenty of controversy, in recent years, by questioning the existence of global warming.
Indeed, he took another shot in the Forbes column. “Let’s leave the ‘invention of facts’ to the left-wing climate-change alarmists,” he wrote, while faulting conservative pundits for a “deliberate misstatement of facts.” He acknowledged that the treatment of the Volt has “managed to make me embarrassed to describe myself as a conservative.”
Lutz was particularly critical of the Fox News broadcast that paired O’Reilly and Dobbs.
“To top it off, these two media pros lamented the fact that the same government that had forced GM to produce the Volt was now extending $7,500 tax credits towards its purchase, thus squandering even more of ‘our taxpayer’ dollars on this failed Socialist-collectivist flop. Truth? The $7,500 tax credit was enacted under the Bush administration!”
While he was cautious in his criticism of the GOP majority leading last week’s House hearing on the Volt, GM CEO Akerson, meanwhile, stressed that the plug-in hybrid was not fostered by the Obama Administration and, in fact, made its public debut a month before the 2008 presidential election.
Lutz insists that not all conservatives have dismissed the Volt, ascribing the problem to a “radical fringe.”
Fox, fair and balanced? I think not. Perhaps it will be left to people like Akerson and Lutz to clear their own henhouse of all of the far-right wolves. One wonders how much advertising money GM spends on the Fox networks, and if that money couldn’t be spent more constructively somewhere else. I don’t expect to turn GM executives into liberals anytime soon, but at the very least it is nice for those executives to see up close and personal what kind of monster they have created with their past support of Fox News, or Faux News, as many have called it. Perhaps a better strategy would be to flood the Fox networks with Volt advertising buys, and especially slot them during the O’Reilly show, perhaps even making the ads a refutal of the claims made by the aging duo of the losing-his-sanity Dobbs and the always-spinning O’Reilly. Using the facts, refuting those claims should not be hard.
Looks to me like Mr. Lutz and Mr. Akerson are reaping what they have sown. Did they really not understand what kind of people they have been supporting and donating to all these years?
To paraphrase The Pretenders: “My Party Was Gone.”
Clearly, the party has been hijacked by the Tea Party, whose vision for the nation is as progressive as the Taliban’s for Afghanistan. Where there was once legitimate debate, there is now only pandering. The more slavish, the better. I would challenge anyone to point to a news report that truly did get the facts right and placed in a proper context.
The Volt arrived at the intersection of the two worst instincts of Washington: the twitchy, anti-auto industry know-nothings huffing Ralph Nader fumes, and the nihilist Republicans sitting astride the Capitol dome like Jimmy Cagney in the film White Heat: “Look Ma, top of the world!”
The abdication of facts in this case is startling: No Volt has caught fire when operated in normal circumstances, and in fact, is a 5-star vehicle. GM has identified a fix and deployed it to the field. They have also mainstreamed it into regular production.
Disgusting and disappointing. When will the truth come out?
Hi, Ragtop,
While I’ll sidestep the politics, I will agree that I am disappointed by the *politicization* of what happened with the Volt.
I believe we have tried our best at sorting through the noise to get at the truth of the episode.
Paul A. Eisenstein
Publisher, TheDetroitBureau.com