How hard can it be though? If a small child manages to wipe his/her own nose then they can be told 'well done!' but it isn't an achievement really. You would n

How hard can it be though? If a small child manages to wipe his/her own nose then they can be told 'well done!' but it isn't an achievement really. You would not commend a grown adult for keeping their face clean. This GM company has been going for a century and for most of that time their products have shown no effort to be considerate of the environment. Stop-start is not rocket science. Light hybrid vehicles are not rocket science. A small child can see the absurdity of cities gridlocked by slow moving or completely stationary vehicles all of them spewing exhaust for no reason. If not the environment it is a waste of petrol. Stop-start has only came along in the last few years, this could have been marketed to people as the thing to have, who doesn't want a nice quiet car when stuck in traffic? But GM never bothered to do stop-start, something that is a nice engineering challenge, not beyond the realms of impossible. In fairness none of their rivals took this route until the laws made CO2 and other emissions a problem for them. We know from EV cars that going down hills does not mean lots of heavy braking, you can store the energy and save the brakes. It would not have been impossible for GM to implement something similar, even fifty years ago a solution could have been worked out with a mechanical flywheel, maybe using the already present battery as the mass for that. GM - and the others - never even bothered with that. The aerodynamics of a car is another aspect where GM failed. It is not hard and even with no wind tunnel it can be deduced that tucking in the windscreen wipers, door handles and other parts will improve the efficiency. The underside of GM (and other) cars is a joke when it comes to aero. They just never bothered. My background is bicycles where a 4 watt gain is pretty good. A 4 Kg weight saving is epic, the difference between a Tour de France bike and what a mere mortal can afford is 4 Kg. The chrome trim on a GM effort weighs more than my heaviest steel mountain bike. Obviously my heavy mountain bike is actually quicker than any GM product through a congested city and I certainly don't have a V8 motor in my inner core. So where is this Bolt thing really? Are we talking rocket surgery or a kid being applauded because they have wiped their own nose? It is easy to criticise when you haven't built a car yourself, sure the realities of mass manufacturing are hard, but I don't think GM have ever really tried. There may be many jobs and communities dependent on GM but there were many jobs and communities dependent on the predecessor companies that made buggies in the Detroit area. The sooner GM is gone the better able the rest of the automotive trade can get on with providing people with cars more in line with Ford's vision, circa Model T era, before GM came along with their planned obsolescence and before the Dodge brothers shafted Ford as best as they could.