> What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.
They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.
A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.
Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.
Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.
They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.
A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.
Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.
Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.