General Motors is wholly beholden to its shareholders, who demand dividends and regular stock splits. That's why they killed the EV1 and sold the Hummer H1: profits on the EV1 were nonexistent while the Hummer was as lucrative an SUV as GM has ever made.

NUMMI died for the same reason as Saturn: The UAW. 'member back when GM was talking about how awesome Saturn was gonna be and they were making cars in Spring Hill, TN? Yeah. Right-to-work state. Meant that the UAW couldn't lock the Spring Hill factory into a union contract with union wages and union benefits. So when the UAW decided to strike GM, one of their demands was that GM close the Spring Hill plant because, you know, fuck those guys that aren't in the union.

Then when GM went bankrupt, they had force majeure to shed contracts and non-performing assets, such as NUMMI. This left Toyota holding the bag on their only union shop in North America and they were able to vanish like a fart in the wind and ramp up production in Texas and Mississippi - also right-to-work states.

Tesla? non-union as fuck.

It's easy to beat the shit out of GM but the fact of the matter is, they're trapped between shareholders that don't give a fuck about their future and workers that don't give a fuck about their future. It works out really well for both sides of that equation but somewhere in the middle, General Motors has to make money. Porsche, Nissan, BMW and Mitsubishi, to the best of my knowledge, don't have any UAW pain points so they can fuck off to Mexico or Mississippi without anybody picketing their headquarters in Detroit.

And Tesla doesn't even have to make money.

What kind of world of shit do you think GM would be in if they built Cadillacs for $160k and sold them for $130k? I'll bet they'd get investigated by congress. How 'bout if Ford suddenly decided to change the price of the GT from $400k to $600k after taking deposits? They'd face criminal charges. Tesla? Tesla gets away with this shit because people don't really consider them a car company when shit hits the fan. Delays? "It's a startup." Price overruns? "Being a visionary company has unforseen complications."

If Elon Musk had to compete in Preston Tucker's environment he'd have been a cautionary tale in 2009. Frankly, if Elon Musk weren't Elon Musk, he'd be Henrik Fisker.