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by 1970-01-017 hours ago |

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This statement doesn’t really seem supported by facts. Battery technology just wasn’t able to make this car for the mass market 25 years ago. GM continuing to keep this very low-volume car in the showrooms for 15 more years at an unattractive price point would not have changed anything. Even if GM had produced a car like the Model S around the same time that Tesla did in our timeline, that would not have guaranteed them anything, nor would it have constrained Tesla’s founders from taking the risk to start that company and succeeding.

by 1970-01-014 hours ago|

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That's an old argument. The Prius hybrid was already running around with the same battery technology. They could have shifted. They could have pivoted. They could have done a very low volume production. The car was killed.

by linksnapzz3 hours ago|

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It's the correct argument. Bob Lutz deals with it in one of his books.

The EV1 was a evaluation exercise/hedge against regulation; the impetus was a lunatic assertion in 1990 by the CA gov't: they wanted 10% of cars sold in the state by 2000 to be electric. Nobody outside of Sacramento thought this would be doable, but it was an excuse to do some useful R&D, as well as to demonstrate to lawmakers the difficulties involved.

As for the Prius-the Gen I Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive cost $380 million in 1990s dollars for R&D. Anybody at GM trying to spend that kind of money on an experimental(!) powertrain for a low-volume(!!) economy(!!!) car would've been fired. At Toyota, Shoichiro Toyoda was supportive of such an idea, despite the limited opportunity for near-term profit; and if you have that last name at that company, nobody's gonna fire you.

by NewJazz3 hours ago|

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Yeah if the volt was released a decade earlier they'd have been a frontrunner in the pure ev space in the late 2010s.

by coryrc4 hours ago|

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If they hadn't lobbied to make small cars more expensive because the margins were lower, they could have built a model that was capable of being EV or gasoline, to get economy of scale for most of the vehicle. Well, worked with Daewoo to make a nicer version of the Chevy Aveo which could be a 4-seater gasoline car or 2-seater EV... Well, problem with that idea is the EV-1 was only popular with Hollywood types because it was a statement vehicle, so everybody knew what you were doing. I guess the dual-purpose vehicle would not.

tl;dr You're right :)