Also supposedly Chevy is losing money on the Bolt.
GM lose $9k on every Volt right now after subsidies and are also having trouble selling them.
http://fortune.com/2017/07/17/gm-shutdown-chevy-bolt-supply/
Margins get thinner (or in this case negative) closer to the bottom of the market.
Tesla doesn't have the EPA slowly tightening the CAFE noose so selling Bolts at a loss might still be a net profit for GM over all because it offsets more profitable products.
Why is this a political discussion all of a sudden?
Then I figured: it's because you can floor it in an EV and nobody notices, so you do it all the time. Whereas in a similar class petrol car, if you floor it from zero and keep it in the optimal rev band, you sound and look like a huge idiot.
Edit: Just to be clear, a constant torque would imply a linearly increasing power output when increasing the revs. Of course Tesla doesn't have that – what they have is high torque, and thus significant power output already at very low revolutions. A typical small DC electric engine has an almost linearly decreasing torque curve (unless capped), although I don't really know specifics about Tesla's engines.
Basically: for an internal combustion engine the force is the force of the explosion averaged over time, so the higher the RPM the shorter the time between explosions the higher the average force (until you get to a point where your cylinders are moving so fast the start fighting against each other).
For an electric car the force is the voltage, there's no impulse to average out, it's just continuous force.
Now of course in reality it's not that simple and you actually do have a torque curve, but compared to ICE it's basically a square wave.
It's a shame seeing people just downvote comments without doing even the most basic research to try to disprove someone.
For proof, here's the actual torque curve for a Model S. http://mihalache.free.fr/TSLA/ModelS.png And you can see very clearly the torque curve looks nothing like a square wave.
Also your assertion about internal combustion engines is wrong as well. At higher RPMs you get less duration with the valves open and you can't get as much fuel and air into the cylinder. It's not that mechanical losses are taking away that force, it's that those explosions are less powerful as you approach redline. Then once you're right up at max RPM you start having to deal with stuff like valve float where the springs pushing the valves back up can't keep up with the camshaft but that's over complicating it for a basic explanation.
The Bolt has great range and I’m sure it’s a joy to drive, but it’s an ugly, tiny subcompact.
No one outside of our tech early-adopter bubble is going to pay $35,000 for a car that looks like that. Every other car that looks like that sells for $18-20k. Most people don’t care what the propulsion is.
The reason the Model 3 has a higher ceiling than the Bolt (if Tesla can figure out their production hell) is because it has the looks and amenities expected of a $35,000 car.
We’re never going to solve emissions if only environmentalists and tech lovers like us stop driving gas cars. There have to be alternatives that are compelling to the masses - and not just that, but compelling at their price point.
People care about the TCO though. If you're gonna make that extra $15k back in fuel savings in the first two years (and I have no idea whether that's the real number or not, and it's probably very dependent on local fuel charges) then regular people will sign up for that.