[Big Dave]

I suspect the boys at V-Vehicle are finding out the same thing that Aptera found out: It ain’t easy starting a car company, even if you do everything right.

Wait til they find out it will take two years to get a permit to build the paint shop.

How many fledgling (and established) car companies have died because they could not keep up on the core competency of making engines? Kaiser, Tucker, DeLorean, Hudson, AMC, Studebaker, Packard, etc.

The last car company started from scratch in the US: Chevrolet in 1911 and it took one of the giants of the industry to do it.

Part of what kills high-MPG cars in general is that they have to be low-priced. Ford, Chrysler and Government Motors have a huge problem with any new model. Due to legacy costs, the car has to make a minimum profit of $5,000 per unit and sell at least 100,000 units a year just to break even and cover legacy costs. The dirty little secret of the auto biz is that all cars and trucks cost about the same - plus or minus $500 – to build. The manufacturing technology is very mature and there really is surprisingly little waste. The big cost variable: leather seats.

Yeah, what they don’t tell you is that the little 2.0 Ecotec costs about the same for the companies to make as a seven-liter LS7.

People will pay $40,000 for a big diesel pickup but they simply won’t pay that for a tandem 1.5 liter 80 MPG car. Even the MPG purists on this board would choke on a super-expensive high-MPG car. That’s why the carbon-fiber VW coffin will never be produced.

Now, if you could knock that $5,000 legacy cost out, a $12,000 special-purpose car might have a chance of selling and making a buck. That is why I was disappointed when GM and Chrysler were not properly liquidated. Somebody could have bought the vertical integration and manufacturing capability on the cheap and gotten out from under the legacy costs and maybe, just maybe a competitive US small car could be possible.

As to Frank Lee’s comments:
If you live far enough “up north” I suppose you don’t need an air conditioner. If you live far enough “down south,” you probably don’t need a heater. But a manufacturer who thinks he is going to sell at least 100,000 units has to address both extremes. This is a huge hurdle for battery-electric cars. Fiats and Yugos failed in the US because for the life of them Fiat could not figure out how to make a decent heater.

Back in the 1970s I had a Cosworth Vega. A 2,200 lb car. Armstrong steering, 290 A/C, and leadfoot brakes. The heater was (like on most GM cars) very good. The thing was a pain to park despite having dinky little BR70-13 tires and weighing just over a ton. Black on black. A oven in the summer if you got caught in traffic and if you could keep going it was a convection oven. Very good performance for the day. The kind of car a twentysomething could love. You probably couldn’t give 100,000 units of the thing away today.

BTW, that car had some sort of magical factory undercoating. Vegas were notoriously rust-prone, but that particular car is licensed today in Ohio. The guy won’t sell it. I’ve tried.