The gov't laid out 3B in incentives to a multitude of companies that produce parts used in the Volt. Not all of these have been or can be claimed. But if it all were claimed, and all of these went into making the Volt, the article took the 3B and divided it by the number of volts sold to date, or something like that since the math doesn't even work when you do that, to come out with 250K/Volt.
By that article's reasoning, the first guy got a 3 billion dollar Volt. And the next guy's Volt isn't worth 250K, but $42 less.
That article is idiocy by numbers. The author brags about his methodology "I added the known state and federal incentives that have been offered and divided by the number of Volts sold. If GM has additional information to add to the public data on the use of taxpayer money, I look forward to seeing it."
Not that I'm a fan of this but on the scale of government waste, I'd rather the government spent money on technology and infrastructure than health care, Iraq, Afghanistan, war on drugs, etc.