It is a 10-15k/year product at best. How does an independent maker get that profitable at <$50k, despite all the costs of setting up a sales and service network?
On the other hand, electric cars seem to be relatively "easy" to build. Sure, Fisker went bankrupt, but Rivian seems to do sort of fine. Xiaomi even managed to build a car, and I actually saw one of them by chance charging next to me today.
Seems to me like a lot more newcomers succeed in getting cars built, than was and is the case with ICE cars.
that said, the problem with these utilitarian vehicles is that they appeal to people who buy cars once every 20 years, whereas most of the industry is serving the very large, very abundant population of Americans buying 2 cars every 2 years