The Chevrolet Volt’s gas-powered internal combustion four sometimes powers the car’s front wheels. Techie Frank Markus described this week how the long-awaited car’s “extended-range electric” system works. Since then, some of General Motors’ many critics have pointed to his description, and that of a few of our competitors, as proof why the new Chevy should be called a plug-in hybrid, not an EV.

By now, the brass occupying the top floors of GM’s Renaissance Center HQ are asking each other, “why do they hate us so much?” Chris Paine painted GM as the guilty party in his 2006 documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” 

After that movie was released, Bob Lutz (pictured at top driving the Volt on the stage during its 2008 world introduction) introduced the Chevrolet Volt concept at the 2007 Detroit auto show, and started referring to the Volt as an “extended range electric car.” The problem in the ensuing years is not with whether GM’s engineers could match Lutz’s description. The problem is that GM’s marketing and public relations department couldn’t, or wouldn’t let go of the original message.

We notched 299 miles during our first real-world test of the Chevy Volt, and recorded 126.7 mpg in the process. Those 299 miles reflected the way an owner might use the Volt under a variety of conditions. If you buy the Volt as your daily commuter, you could use it Monday through Friday without burning a drop of gasoline, assuming you live within 18 miles from work (and can’t plug it in at work).

Then you could cover all your weekend errands with it, plus maybe dinner and a movie. Or you could take it on a weekend getaway, say from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara or Detroit to Grand Rapids (fold down the rear seats and take your mountain bikes) and burn maybe $10 of unleaded premium.

Volt advertising is trying to explain this all to American consumers. It’s “the only electric car that uses gas to create its own electricity.” Well, yikes. I mean, GM is still calling it an electric car, and it’s still struggling to describe how it works.

I don’t know anything about marketing, but how about something like, “an electric car most of the time, a real car all of the time”? Awkward, perhaps, but in the last five years, GM marketing has had a lot of time to polish an accurate description into something more elegant.
 
For more than three of those last five years, it was under the Old GM, the same company whose marketing department failed to delineate too many brands long after “a car for every purse and purpose” had lost its value. Take the Pontiac Grand Am and Oldsmobile Alero. I once asked someone at Pontiac what, under the skin, made the Grand Am different from the Alero. Did the Excitement Division bless the Grand Am with a sportier chassis? Well, not in the springs and shocks — the Pontiac exec said the Grand Am felt sportier because it had different seat mounts. That kind of thinking explains why GM marketing did nothing for the Volt for its first three-and-a-half years of development.

Since July 2009′s bankruptcy, we’ve seen many signs of GM’s transformation. It’s a much smaller, slimmer automaker with seriously competitive new management at the top. Insiders say GM brass doesn’t hold meetings about holding meetings anymore, and the actual meetings are shorter. Presumably, they’re not guided by PowerPoints anymore, either. Things are getting done, and the promising future product in the works pre-bankruptcy is progressing apace.

For the last year, GM Chairman Ed Whitacre has shuffled and re-shuffled the marketing department. I don’t know whether he’s satisfied with the current marketing department, with ex-Hyundai, ex-Nissan exec Joel Ewanick (pictured at left) leading it, but in the meantime, the Volt seems to have slipped through the cracks.

By the time some engineers revealed a few months ago that the Volt’s internal combustion engine powers the front wheels under certain conditions, including speeds above 70 mph, GM marketing should have been hard at work to fix Lutz’s original message.

So it’s not a pure electric. If you can afford to sit around and not go anywhere while your pure electric recharges, don’t buy a Chevy Volt.

Since its bankruptcy, GM has had about 14 months to get the message right on its most important new car (from an image standpoint, if nothing else) in decades. It should have been honest with the question of whether there is any connection between engine and wheels. And it should have spent some time, money and imagination to develop a new, post-Lutzian description for the Chevy Volt.

Its failure to do so raises a big question: Is New GM any different than Old GM?

As you’ll read in our First Test of Chevy’s stunning new Volt, my experience with the car suggests GM has indeed delivered the car it promised. It appears to be a technological moonshot that’s achieving its lofty objectives. But I’m an old guy with a long-ish memory that’s been sensing some deja vu throughout Chevrolet’s carefully orchestrated rollout of the Volt.

I remember another Chevy that promised to rewrite the rulebook with the introduction of tons of new technology. That car was also hyped for months and months beforehand so that by the time the press was presented with the real deal the unveiling was perceived as the Second Coming. It boasted a revolutionary engine and a 95-percent robotized body shop that helped enable a never before heard of line-production rate of 100 or more cars per hour. Even the shipping method was to be unique and revolutionary–the cars were engineered so that no fluids would leak out when transported vertically standing on their noses in specially designed rail cars that could accommodate 30 cars instead of 18.

Have you guessed the car yet? It was the 1971 Chevy Vega. A small car boasting big-car values and highway cruising ability that was designed to, once and for all, drive those pesky foreign cars back into the oceans across which they’d come. Motor Trend crowned it Car of the Year in 1971 and lived to regret that decision. Commenters in our Volt First Drive forum are already rooting loudly for Chevy’s plug-in hybrid wonder to take the calipers for 2011 next month. Is this car likely to create the same sort of regret?

I really want to think not. When you study what went wrong during the Vega’s troubled gestation (John DeLorean tells all in “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors”), it’s clear to see that that car was destined for trouble. Larger-than-life personalities drove bad decisions that forced untenable designs on engineers who knew them to be untenable but were forced to try to make the predetermined design viable.

With the Volt, a larger-than-life personality (Bob Lutz) may have helped launch the program, and may have influenced the controversial decision to use such a large battery pack (driving the cost of the program way up), but the inherent design is sound — far better in fact than Toyota’s for a plug-in hybrid — and the tight-knit team that has brought the concept to production has been pulling hard in the same direction throughout the Volt’s fairly compressed development period. Another encouraging fact is that funding for this program was never interrupted throughout the corporation’s recent bankruptcy unpleasantness. Indeed our limited time with the car unveiled no fatal flaws. (Then again, I suppose our first Vega drives didn’t evince any melting engines or runaway fender rust either.)

Still, all evidence seems to suggest that General Motors remembers the Vega too, and has doubled down to ensure those mistakes aren’t repeated. Here’s hoping — for all our sakes — they really have gotten it right this time.

The unemployment rate remained steady at a depressing 9.6 percent last month. Private sector growth is slim as companies build up cash instead of hiring new workers, and budget-strapped state and local governments have to lay off public-sector workers.

As if that weren’t enough, real estate and mortgage banking are striking again. By suspending foreclosures in all 50 states, Bank of America is just delaying the pain. When all the foreclosure paperwork catches up, a flood of foreclosed homes could make your McMansion worth an even trade on a Chevy Volt.

I bring all this up because other assignments and some necessary time out of the office kept me from blog posts covering September and August sales. I wrote in mid-September that August sales weren’t as bad as expected, but of course there was a nuance to this – expectations were very low for August sales.

For good reason. The manner in which the economic recovery had begun to stall led some analysts to believe the month was going to be even worse. Ward’s reports that automakers sold 994,298 cars and light trucks in August, then just 956,248 in September.

And even those numbers were buoyed slightly by an influx of long-awaited new models, like the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, Chrysler’s first all-new model in years. This month, Ford crowed about selling the first 3,050 Fiestas in the U.S., and said they scored a higher average transaction price than the 13,587 Focuses Ford sold in September.

Well, of course. The Focus is a stopgap model that’s very close to being replaced. The Fiesta is all new, though those first customers ordered more options and accessories than even Ford expected, which indicates many of them had stickers north of $20,000. As if in response, Ford has announced the all-new 2012 Focus will have a base price ranging from $16,995 to $24,785.

As with the Flex, there will be a Titanium trim level, with leather seats, rain-sensing wipers and rear sonar. As with the Fiesta’s pricing scheme, the Focus Titanium hatchback, at $23,490 to $24,785, will be more expensive than the Focus Titanium sedan, at $22,995 to $24,290.

Ford, the company that put America on wheels, seems bent on making the automobile a luxury item, again. And luxury cars are no bull market these days, either.

“People who can afford to buy are waiting,” which is stifling the luxury car market in the U.S., says Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics. This, at a time when automakers have a lot of luxury models on deck, or just released. There’s the new Jaguar XJ, Audi A8 and BMW 5 Series, to name just three.

Credit has eased up since last year’s dark days, though the credit rating threshold for new car loans is higher. One example is the Chevrolet Volt, offered at a reasonable $350 per month lease, with $2,500 down, versus a sticker of $41k. Problem is, that reasonable lease payment is based on an expected high residual value. You’ll need the kind of credit necessary for a much higher-priced car than the $350 payment suggests.

As General Motors lurches to its planned Initial Public Offering, probably some time next month, this adds up to a dismal fourth quarter for car sales. 2953′s Hall predicts a final number in the 11.7- to 11.8-million range (like about half the auto analysts, his numbers don’t include medium- and heavy trucks).

That’s not a bad number, on the lower-middle end of the broad predictions automakers made at the beginning of the year (generally, 11.5- to 12.5-million). The bad news for us – and the Obama White House – is that sales increases from the first half of the year are going to prop up the last three or four months. (One interesting take on the Obama economy is; “Now it’s official: Obama is another Reagan,” by Steve Kornacki, at salon.com).

One consolation, I guess, is that the fourth quarter will test the new GM management’s promise that it can make money at 18 percent market share, in a 10-million unit year. GM’s cultural and financial changes have been fairly impressive so far, but it’s hard to crack inside the company and figure out exactly how well or poorly it’s being run, even though we’re the majority owners. If the downturn in auto sales holds for the next several months, we should learn a lot more about the New GM.