We may be forever waiting for hydrogen fuel cells to be ready for mainstream production. Ditto battery technology or charging infrastructure advancing rapidly enough to make pure electric vehicles viable as anything other than second cars. Until then, however, there’s the Chevy Volt. Designed to travel 30-35 miles on electric power before its gasoline engine kicks in to allow for longer trips, this plug-in hybrid is the most wrongly maligned car in history. The Volt is a truly revolutionary vehicle that could allow the vast majority of Americans to wean themselves off gasoline for their weekday commuting, but still allow trips to grandma’s house on the weekends.
The Volt is not only the most recent of the cars we chose, but we feel that it ties with the Ford Model T for number-one on our list as the most innovative breakthrough car of all time. If the Model T can be called the first “real car” of the twentieth century for being the first to be reliably mass produced, then the Volt, we think, is the first “real car” of the 21st century because it the first true game-changer we have seen since 2000 delivered to consumer driveways.
