That assumes people in charge of crunching numbers at GM are perfectly rational and have even studied the possibility. As far as I’m aware there wasn’t even so much as an off hand comment from an engineer at a trade show about looking into reusing the Voltec system on any other platform before killing off the whole line.
It’s entirely possible they did look into recycling the tech elsewhere but GM has a track record of just writing off tech right as they iron out the kinks.
It’s truly is exasperating to think how much R&D went into perfecting that system only for GM to throw it all in the trash. The fact Toyota of all companies is doing a better job selling the concept of the Volt with the Prius and Rav4 Prime trims is just rubbing salt in the wound.
Only problem with the Bolt is GM keeps threatening to kill it. Also I dont know what it is with GMs inventory system but they seem to have a glut of Bolts in some markets and two year waiting lists in others.
Honestly was continually baffled this operation was freestanding so I don’t really see this as a bad thing so long as they keep their own R&D team (knowing GM though, they probably sadly won’t).
Creating a weird pseudo freestanding brand can’t have been confidence inspiring to procurement people looking at getting an EV fleet. At least now they’ll be able to leverage existing commercial customer relations and offer the vehicles with a badge that has 100 years of history behind it and not one from a team out of Detroit larping as a Silicon Valley startup.
All things considered this isn’t a great first showing but given how badly Japanese vendors have managed to fumble EV rollout so far it could have been a lot worse. It seems like a perfectly serviceable platform to build on at least but my god at that price tag and especially without a heat pump option I don’t see this moving many units. As it stands, in NA it would be a very hard sell compared to a Bolt EUV and the competition is going to be much stiffer in Europe.
I do wonder what Honda’s plans are here. Are they pushing this out to market just to get some form of return on tooling costs even if they only move a couple thousands while they work on a second gen vehicle?
Side note, I’m kind of amazed vendors are still shipping review samples out with low-resistance tires, especially in this case given this platform does not seem calibrated for them given the reported traction issues.
I get what this is trying to accomplish but the result seems like all the downsides of a hub motor and an axle mounted motor with the only upside being slight potential weight savings and slight packaging space efficiency gains. I could see this having some uses for oddball industrial equipment but I will be very surprised if this even makes it onto a concept car.