Chevy cutting price of the 2014 Volt electric car by $5,000

The Chevy Volt is one of the more unusual electric cars being offered in the US today — it combines an electric engine with a standard gas engine for times when you’ll need more range than the car’s battery can provide. However, it doesn’t come cheap, with a sticker price of nearly $40,000. However, parent company GM just made it a bit more of a palatable option: the 2014 Volt will be about $5,000 cheaper than the previous model. When you add in potential government tax credits of up to $7,500, Chevy says the car could be as cheap as $27,495 — of course, those tax credits will vary by the individual, so don’t automatically count on them.

While the price cut will be welcome by those who had Chevy’s electric car in their sights, it’s not quite the discount that GM CEO Dan Akerson promised earlier this year. At a conference in May, Akerson claimed that Volt prices could decrease between $7,000 and $10,000 in a future model, but it looks like Chevy wasn’t quite able to make the economics for such a large cut work just yet. Of course, it wasn’t clear if Akerson was talking about the next model year or a more fully-fledged redesign, so we can’t judge this discount too harshly. Still, it’s part of a nice turnaround for the car — in 2012, Chevy dealt with Volt battery issues and had to halt production due to poor sales, but now the company says it’s the top selling plug-in vehicle in the country.