The WSJ’s Holman Jenkins splashes some cold water on the suggestion that General Motors’ Volt automobile will have much of a positive impact either environmentally or on GM’s bottom line:

At best, the Volt will be an affluent family’s third car. It will have to be plugged in for six hours a day – i.e., it will be a car for a suburbanite with a sizeable garage wired for power. It won’t be a car for a city dweller who parks on the street or in a public lot. It will travel 40 miles on a six-hour charge. After that, a small gas motor will kick in to recharge the battery while you drive. Some reports claim the Volt will get 50 mpg in this mode, but that’s hallucinatory: If using a gasoline engine to power an electric motor were so efficient, the streets would be full of such vehicles. (Our guess: The car will be lucky to get 15 mpg under gasoline power.)

Notice that, even today, some people continue to buy SUVs capable of hauling eight passengers, the dog and groceries, though they spend most of their time in the car driving alone. Customers value flexibility in their vehicles. For a car with the Volt’s narrow usability to sell would require an unlikely revolution in consumer behavior, especially if gasoline prices aren’t going to $10 a gallon.

So why is GM placing so much emphasis on development of an auto that is not particularly competitive in the marketplace? The answer: government financing:

GM executives are not nuts. They justify the costs and risks of the Volt as a way of changing GM’s image in the minds of consumers and politicians. To commit a pun, the Volt is GM’s vehicle for making a bailout of GM politically acceptable.

The company has already started signaling it expects Washington to provide a whopping $7,000 tax credit to Volt purchasers. In Europe and the U.S., under whatever fuel economy and emissions regulations prevail, GM also expects special favoritism for the Volt. The goal is to re-enact the flex-fuel hoax, in which GM receives extra credit for making cars that can burn 85% ethanol, even if they never see a drop of such fuel.

CEO Rick Wagoner last week laid out the case to Barack Obama personally for turning GM into a ward of the state, by way of direct and indirect subsidies to support a transition to "alternative" fuel vehicles. GM has done yeoman’s work getting its structural costs (i.e., labor) in line, but shareholders should note that a big part of the company’s turnaround gamble consists also of eliciting favor once again from Washington after a period in which the domestic auto makers were nothing but whipping boys on Capitol Hill.

.  .  . [GM is] betting the Volt will trigger a change in Washington’s taste for bailing out a domestic car maker.

Finally, Jeff Matthews channels Hamlet in expressing his skepticism about GM’s strategy:

The least helpful call you will get today is so unhelpful that, young as the day might be, we think there is no chance it will be superseded by anything even less helpful as the morning wears on.

This particularly unhelpful call comes from the alma mater of the proprietor of this blog, Merrill Lynch, and it is a downgrade of General Motors stock, from “Buy” to “Underperform.”

The analyst has also lowered his price target on the stock from, and we are not making this up, $28 to $7. Last trade: $11.75.

The reasoning behind the change is not particularly important. Like Hamlet’s recounting of Claudius’ commission for the killing of Hamlet, these things are always “larded with many several sorts of reasons” which all avoid the essential issue: the analyst has been wrong; his clients and his sales force all know he’s been wrong; he can’t take it anymore; and he’s throwing in the towel.

We know: been there, done that.