Not surprising at all. However, as I observed some months back, GM did a lot of good just by *planning* to build the Volt. Or, rather, not just by planning to do it, but by publicly saying they were going to do it, and by advertising it, and by saying they'd ship in 2009, and by pushing the whole package into everyone's collective face. They blew a lot of money on ads, which assured that EVs were on the minds of even the most ordinary and poorly informed car buyer who gets most of his information from the stuff which is broadcast in the station breaks during soap operas.
And other car companies saw those ads, too, of course. I seriously think GM's ad campaigns had a lot to do with the push by so many other companies to produce electric vehicles absolutely ASAP, rush-rush, spare no corner in trying to get it out the door before the Volt. By the time GM slipped the delivery date of Volt from 2009 to 2010 there were already more than one company with announced 2009 delivery dates of EVs of one sort or another, which means the snowball was already rolling, and we're now seeing "all the other car companies" competing with each other to get EVs to market, despite the fact that GM has dropped out of the running. It's a snowball and it's rolling. And I think GM had a lot to do with the initial push. But seriously, they've been out of the game ever since they slipped their delivery by a year; they named the game, they drew the finish line (in 2009), they fired the starting gun ... and then they screwed up, as usual, but the effects of their initial spade work remain. Jed Rothwell wrote: > I was expecting them to shut down the Volt R&D and production. This is > appalling but not surprising, alas.
