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Originally Posted by ERTW
I still take issue with people who demonize gm for "killing the electric car". They invested one BILLION dollars in r&d, and they're supposed to be happy selling 80 cars at $80k each?!
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No they are expected to lose money to start just like every corporation that introduces something "new" like Microsoft on the Xbox or pilot runs on new foods or countless other products, the idea is that the real world owners provide R&D value in excess of what they can do just paying some guy $50k/year to keep driving test cars around taking notes.
The reason they cost $80k each is because they never went into production afterwards to amortize out the total R&D cost. The people that loved them to the point of wanting to buy them off lease showed there was a market. They performed better than modern electrics by what I can tell. Instead of rolling up production which would drop prices per car they just canned it all.
What i'm saying is I don't see how there was more profit crushing and destroying the EV1's after use instead of SELLING them. Plus considering GM gets handed billion(S) of dollars to do things like go build new factories... in brazil... to create jobs and cars for brazillians instead of doing it here, it's not like they are martyrs over it. I heard most of their EV1 R&D was indirectly subsidized thru some govt program at the time but I cant remember/source that right now so don't quote me. Heck taxpayer subsidies went to hybrid buyers up til last year too, it's nothing new. The only thing that doesn't make sense is acting like GM spent a billion just to come up with a car that couldn't be sold and had no profit potential - the biggest reason it didn't make a profit was they didn't even TRY to sell any end product result of it after having a proven market, full stop.