Dauntless
100 TW
fatty said:The Toecutter said:GM could have done the same thing 10+ years before Tesla existed, but the common excuse for not doing so was "market forces". . . The fact that it was a cult of personality who made it all happen is irrelevant. . . .
No, GM couldn't have even come close in the early to mid-90s. They didn't have the funding, tech, engineers, and demand (by way of subsidy) at that time, not to mention the risk of cannibalizing actually-profitable sales needed to keep the company solvent. Keep in mind, the closest contemporary, the Prius, sold at a $10k/vehicle loss for the first, what, 10 years?
GM was having little luck getting people who had said they wanted to lease an EV1 to actually pick one up. Self sabotague is a hoax cooked up by Plugin America, while it's documented that nobody wanted the 30 miles or less range electric cars of the time. The UCBerkeley study of the year 2000 concluded that Toyota would have to give a free RAV4 electric for free AND pay the driver $7,000 to get them to take the car. (Well, they wouldn't have HAD to pay me the $7k to take the free car, but if they INSISTED. . . .)
The conclusion was that Toyota would have been unable to sell 6,400, 2% of their total California sales at the time, to meet the CARB regulation mandate that was repealed for lack of interest.
And the cult of personality is about the ONLY thing that got Tesla through the early years. It sure wasn't business success. But it was so KEWL to have the expensive roadster that didn't work right but, ooooooh, the movie star electric car. It was THAT cult of personality that brought electric cars to where they are now.
https://www.wardsauto.com/news-analysis/california-study-says-mass-market-not-ready-electric-vehicles