If politicians designed a car...

...it would look just like the Chevy Volt.

Oh -- they did. And it does.

Here's my latest column for Sun Media:

Taxpayer re-Volt

GM — that stands for Government Motors now — has announced a car that will make Ford’s doomed Edsel look like a hit.

The electric Chevrolet Volt will roll off the assembly lines next year.

The price is a staggering $41,000 US — a BMW price for a Chevy.

Price isn’t the only clanger here. The car can only travel for about 65 km on an electric charge. After that, it fires up a gas-powered engine like everything else on the road. So much for reduce, reuse, recycle — this is a car with two engines. Hummers only have one.

And Hummers don’t have a massive battery that’s about as easy to dispose of when the car’s finally done as a tub of PCBs.

The Volt is more than twice as expensive as its non-electric counterparts. It can’t drive far enough to get from one city to another. And when your Volt has a low battery, it literally takes hours to recharge. So maybe it will ready to go when you need it. Maybe it won’t.

I checked; the name “Smart Car” is already taken, but “Dumb Car” is available.

GM knows this. Which is why it plans to produce only 10,000 of them next year.

If P.T. Barnum were alive today, he’d love the Volt. Barnum’s unofficial motto was “there’s a sucker born every minute.” But besides just plain fools, the Volt will have two natural bases of customers.

The first are the preening, morally superior types who won’t buy the Volt primarily to drive it. They’ll buy it to tell people they’ve bought it as proof of their enlightened righteousness.

So Hollywood should be good for a few hundred.

Arianna Huffington, the left-wing millionaire activist, prefers to fly in private jets, and when she must travel on the lowly ground, she likes to be chauffeured in full-size SUVs. But she also owns a Toyota Prius as proof of how environmentally sensitive she is. The new Chevy Volt? She’s so eco-sensitive, she’ll probably take two!

The other buyers of the Chevy Volt will be the people who forced it on GM in the first place: Politicians.

When U.S. President Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, he modestly announced that was the moment when “our planet began to heal.” He championed the Volt in his presidential run, and pledged to put a million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015.

Obama is now the largest investor in GM, so he calls the shots, not the marketing department. If it’s electric cars the boss wants, it’s electric cars he’ll get — though GM is sane enough only to make a handful. That’ll be enough for Obama to order a bunch for government fleets.

But this isn’t just an all-American folly. Because every single Canadian family owns a slice of GM now. Last year, Canadian taxpayers “invested” $9.5 billion into GM, and American taxpayers spent a staggering $52 billion on the bailout. And then there’s the $2.9 billion Canada gave to Chrysler, too.

It’s clear what the big autoworkers unions got out of it: A massive subsidy for their huge wages and pensions. And GM and Chrysler got an unfair advantage over Ford and more popular Japanese competitors.

Taxpayers? Between the feds and Ontario’s spending, we paid $2.1 million for each auto job “saved.”

And we got the Volt.