Bob Lutz may no longer be vice chairman of General Motors, but the former executive has taken it upon himself to defend the Chevrolet Volt against the outspoken right.
Lutz, chief creator of the Volt and a self-proclaimed conservative Republican, took issue with a recent segment on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News that essentially labeled the Volt as a fire hazard and a failure pushed on the American public by the left-wing Obama administration. The segment also criticized the $7,500 tax credit available to Volt buyers.
Lutz was quick to defend the Volt in a recent article in Forbes, pointing out that not a single Volt has ever caught fire in the wild and that the entire Volt program was started well before GM was given federal money. Lutz also notes that the Volt’s $7,500 tax credit was actually enacted under the Bush administration.
But Lutz took things a step farther from there, accusing his own Republican party of slamming the Volt simply as a way to discredit the current administration.
“What on Earth is wrong with the conservative media movement that it feels it’s OK to spread false information, OK to damage the reputation of perhaps the finest piece of mechanical technology our country has produced since the space shuttle, OK to hurt an iconic American company that is roaring back to global pre-eminence, OK to hurt American employment in Hamtramck, Mich., as long as it damages the Obama administration’s reputation?â€
He added: “While as a conservative Republican I may well share the goal, I deplore the means employed to attain it. The conservative cause damages itself, destroys its credibility through the expedient spreading of untruths.â€
Despite his criticism of the Republican party, don’t expect Lutz to be flipping sides any time soon. He ended the article by saying the right-wing media should “leave the “invention of facts†to the left-wing climate-change alarmists.â€
