Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich returned to a favorite target, slamming the Chevrolet Volt as an impractical vehicle, while stumping on the campaign trail in Louisiana Wednesday, three days ahead of that state's primary.
"I've tried to explain this psychologically, you can't put a gun rack in a Volt," Gingrich said to supporters in Pineville, La., repeating a line of attack he used in February.
Last month, however, one Chevy driver set out to prove the former Speaker wrong by actually building a gun rack into the back of his Volt, which he documented in a video posted to YouTube.
The former House Speaker did in fact acknowledge the YouTube challenge Wednesday, but pointed out that there might be another problem with the electric car.
"Now to be honest, there's actually, after I said that a couple times, there's actually a YouTube video of guy in Atlanta, who owns a Volt, who put a gun rack in the trunk, but a friend of mine, who was a hunter down in Camilla, looked at it and said 'yeah you can get the gun rack in the trunk, but then where do you put the deer?'" said Gingrich to laughter from the audience.
Gingrich has repeatedly mocked the Volt and President Obama's plan to provide subsidies for plug-in electric cars.
"Since we're all about to run out of oil, I guess the government has to be responsible and it's a very different model," he said. "Part of that model was, of course, to force us into smaller and smaller and smaller cars, so the president likes the Volt, the Volt gets a $7,500 tax credit if you buy one."
The YouTube video wasn't the only rebuke of Gingrich's original Volt statement.
General Motors, the maker of the Volt, fired back at the presidential contender in a statement posted on the company blog last month titled, "We Did Not Engineer the Volt to Be a Political Punching Bag."
"Newt Gingrich has taken up saying that "You can’t put a gun rack on a Volt." That’s like saying "You can’t put training wheels on a Harley." Actually, you can. But the real question is "Why would you?" said the GM response.
PolitiFact Georgia also weighed in on the controversy, declaring Gingrich's statement "false" on its "Truth-o-Meter." The fact-checking site, a project of the Tampa Bay Times, said its own reporters were able to install two gun racks into a Volt.
However, the whole Volt/gun rack debate might be a moot point for the time being, since it was announced earlier this month that GM is suspending production of the vehicle for five weeks amid disappointing sales.
