The Vaporware of Cars

The Times takes on the much-ballyhooed idea of a gas-free drive.


Tomorrow’s Chevrolet: Two Vaporwares in Every Garage?
By Jerry Garrett
Vaporware is a term the computer industry uses to describe a new product that is hyped but never delivered. That term came to mind when I saw the new Chevrolet advertising campaign, “Gas-Friendly to Gas-Free.”
“I’ve heard the future,” the announcer tells an apparently gullible audience of children with their ears pressed to the hood of the Chevrolet Volt concept car, “and it hums.”
Actually, I’ve listened to the Volt too, and it doesn’t make any noise, much less hum. That’s because the show car is a mock-up without an actual powerplant. Where is the actual powerplant? It’s still on someone’s drawing board. Or perhaps it hasn’t even graduated from the designer’s imagination yet. Either way, it’s still vaporware. Until it’s real, it’s just make-believe.

Batteries for the Chevrolet Volt have yet to be invented.The ad campaign touts five ways that Chevrolet is seizing the auto industry’s environmental leadership, including mileage-improving cylinder deactivation programs, ethanol capability, hybrids, “gas-free” (if you drive less than 40 miles a day) “electric” vehicles like the Volt, and fuel-cell vehicles, such as the hydrogen-burning Equinox concept.