I'm going to guess the previous comment was in reference to the GM EV1 program[0]. I didn't read the whole article but I think GM lost around USD$800 million.

It's a "fun topic" because you can find an incredible amount of "fanboi-ism" about whether or not GM was on the side of good or evil. I live in SE Michigan, my Dad owned a business that was a supplier to GM and my long-term girlfriend works there[1]. And here's me ... I don't care about cars. I intentionally avoided "the big three" and any company that most of its business was "work for the big three[2]".

They either created it prematurely in order to destroy the market entirely, entered it prematurely in order to scare off smaller competition (akin to buying up the little guys and dismantling them in the manner of the electric rail cars), used it without any serious desire to create a legitimate product but only to harm their competitors through CARB regulations (them being the only EV manufacturer) ... frankly, I find all of that to be a bit tin-foil hat[3]. I've heard a million other arguments for and against but at the end of the day they poured a lot of money into it. I think they rightly recognized that "the issue was battery technology" and made a dangerous bet on it[3].

I suspect they expected the battery tech would improve, the cost would go down and they could control the losses by limiting production, refitting leased vehicles with newer tech and re-leasing them, eventually getting to a profitable state well before their competitors figured any of it out. Meanwhile, they'd take every advantage they could from government regulators/grants/programs (why wouldn't they?!). Unfortunately, 1999 tech wasn't up to producing a car that could be used to get to and from work in sub-freezing temperatures and there was no charging infrastructure at all.

Fast-forward to today ... I'm seriously considering a Bolt[4]. They have a lot of "regular old consumer" electric vehicles on the road for quite a while now and have had a few bumps in the road[4].

I think some of the GM hate originates from people being sore about the bailout. Hell, even living here and knowing how awful the impact would have been without it, I don't know how I felt about it at the time. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's kind of pointless to be sore about it any longer ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[1] Doing a job who's responsibilities are sufficiently complex enough that I can't explain them because I don't entirely understand them.

[2] Somehow I had a 17-year career at a global multinational telecom that nobody locally would be able to identify, then went on to conferencing software and a company that was mostly IoT but also did quite a bit with the autos, so I did end up doing a few (rather cool) things in the automotive space despite my efforts to avoid.

[3] An argument often made is that GM wouldn't sell these cars, they would only lease them. I'm not sure if that's true or not but I know the initial reason for the lease-only choice was that replacing the battery in the vehicle was $40,000 and was expected to be necessary after two years.

[4] I fully expected fires and the like ... and expect more of it as manufacturers figure out that "Li-Ion is hard" and municipalities discover that they need to refit their fire departments. I mean, I'm presently driving around with an incredibly flammable liquid in a device that operates by making it explode in a controlled manner. I don't believe for a second that the problems presented by these batteries can't similarly be solved.