The Volt was also conceived in the late 2000s when gas prices were high. It was partially a hedge against skyrocketing gas prices. Between the first major oil price crisis in the '70s and today, people reliably buy bigger, more polluting cars when oil is cheap and smaller, less polluting cars when oil is expensive.

Fracking may have semi-permanently put a cap on the cost of oil, which is horrific from a global warming standpoint but does seem to have altered what cars most people purchase.

The Volt also had the wrong body style based on changing consumer preferences. If GM had put the Voltec drive train in a compact SUV it probably would have sold better.

I firmly believe this was done on purpose. They knew what they were doing by making it look like a tonka toy. EVs were just a write-off attempt by GM that didn't get the gov backing they wanted, so they made sure production remained low by making the cars hideous.

That seems unlikely considering how much engineering effort GM put into the Volt. It wasn't just a compliance car, at least not at first. If they expected it to fail they would have minimized that investment and half-assed it.

When GM started Volt development in about 2006, sedans were still popular and the Toyota Prius was selling relatively well. So I think GM just failed to anticipate the market shift.

It actually wasn't just a compliance car, but they knew up front that it would fail.

About 20 years ago, the classic The Innovator's Dilemma came out. Included was a chapter based on a report the author had done for the auto industry back in the 1990s. On existing technology curves he found that mass market electric cars for the American model should become commercially viable around 2020, and in the next several years after that would become dominant. Until then it was a bad business to be in, and after that success was imperative for any car manufacturer that wants to remain in business.

The same author in that book and its follow-up The Innovator's Solution said that conventional car manufacturers would come up with hybrid cars first, but that route would lose to fully electric. Exactly how sailing ship companies came up with hybrid steam/sailing ships (go under steam for short trips, and you have sails if you run out of coal on a long trip), but all manufacturers who invested in that lost.

GM's actions show that they understood a lot of the message of those books. They worked on hybrid cars once that was commercially feasible, and put in the effort to figure out how to make good electric cars. They did this knowing that the technology wasn't yet commercially viable. They have declared that their future is electric only, and are explicitly avoiding committing to the tempting hybrid mistake.

That said, it remains to be seen whether they are committing another mistake pointed out in The Innovator's Solution. Which is that they are trying to make the switch without doing it as a spinoff, without separating the companies, and trying to leverage existing dealer networks. Which opens them to the problem that dealers have come to expect maintenance costs as a big part of their profit model, and therefore will try to steer customers away from electric, or will try to charge extra to stay in business. If GM can't resolve this conflict, they will fail.

in effect, when the ZEV credit rules changed so GM which has a ZEV credit printer in the Bolt no longer needed the Volt and this also coincided with their decision to drop the Cruze and other smaller sedans. From 2018 and onward the credit a PHEV could get is sufficiently lower than before.[1]

GM rushed the Bolt out because also ending in 2017 were two ZEV related credit (CARB credits by another name) traits that were easily exploited, banking them for future use and double dipping by getting credit in a non CARB state for a sale there plus the CARB credit.

The key thing to note about EV sales, how to tell if a manufacturer is serious about selling them. The common figure of twenty to twenty five thousand units is bandied about as where the CARB value falls off after. As in, selling into that maximum allows GM and others to exploit the credit system to the extent it covers all possible sales for their other vehicles. This number will slowly increase but when they say "we cannot sell more because we cannot get batteries" don't believe them

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/california-and-western...

Although technology has taken huge leaps, particularly in the specific energy of batteries and combustion engines, after the 2000 Honda Insight, the first new model car (in Canada) to match or exceed the Insight's efficiency came in 2017(!) with the Hyundai Ioniq.

From my perspective, energy prices and auto regulations are the biggest reasons it took that long.

Isn't that also a bit tautological given how fixed costs are divided over units produced? If they produced and sold more they would be cheaper. Of course that assumes they would sell well if they put more effort into doing so.

That works if they're losing money due to not selling enough volume to recoup the startup costs. However if they're actually selling them for less money than they cost to make, every unit sold is just adding to the loss.

If it costs $1,000,000 to design a car and I sell that car for $30,000 and I sell 33 cars, I've lost $10k. But just selling one more car will turn a profit.

On the other hand if that car costs $32,000 to make and I'm selling it for $30,000... GM has long been in the business, for whatever reason, of selling cars below cost [1]. And for the Volt, it's more like selling a $40k car that actually costs $80k to manufacture [2], not even taking engineering and marketing costs as a factor.

Selling more Bolts and Volts would hurt GM, not help.

[1] https://www.hotcars.com/gm-admits-bolt-not-profitable/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2012/09/10/stu...

> not even taking engineering and marketing costs as a factor.

It looks like engineering is included as "Development" in the original report: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-generalmotors-volt/factbo...

>Of course that assumes they would sell well if they put more effort into doing so...

And there's the rub. People say they want these things, but when it comes time to open the pocketbook, their calculations change. Worst thing is that the people who can afford this stuff will instead drop more money on an ICE SUV.

:(