“Too bad about the price. If they could’ve made them for half the price they would’ve been the greatest things on the planet since the model T Ford.”
Yep. If they had committed to building 100,000/yr they could have sold them all at $25K and made a profit.
I understand that they couldn’t do that, however, with an entirely new design. If there had a been a serious flaw found — not the bogus overblown battery fire issue, but something real — they would have had to eat a huge loss.
People don’t realize that with a gasoline vehicle, there is never any such thing as a “new design”, as it is built on reusing 100 years of refinement. With the Volt it was not “refinement” but entirely new system integration issues that were bound to have teething pains.
GM is not capable of building anything brand new, earth shattering, ground breaking, revolutionary...for anything even in the ball park of a sane pricepoint...even with daddy-obama-warbucks backing them. GM is a factory. They are extremely good at assembling things that other people design...maybe the best in the world bar none. They have a serious labor cost problem. They have a serious “inertia” problem in terms of adaptability and flexibility. They are overburdened with internal bureaucracy. These are terrible hurdles to overcome.
That is the root of the problem.