Hey GM, Remember the old adage "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday"? There is a surplus of older affordable EV iron just begging to raise some eyebrows at local tracks. Nothing is going to garner interest quicker than a Volt or Spark doing heinous things quietly to the local track heros. Power upgrades and making swaps easier would go a very long way to garnering interest in current and future hybrids and EVs. When you think "performance" and "EV", what springs to mind? Not GM. And I'm asking, "Why not?" Uncuff the EV's. An easy one would be to bless the Volts with the now defunct '16 Cadillac ELR programming. The performance would be real and wouldn't be out of bounds for the hardware as it's made for the same powertrain. You could partner with, say, Superchips to make a plug in programmer so people could flash their own cars. Back in the day, if you wanted more performance the guy at the GM Parts counter would be more than happy to sell you a big cam, headers, high rise intake, huge carb, custom heads, and all the gear to support it. Being as all the limitations on an EV are programmed in this seems like really low hanging fruit. No parts needed, just pure profit. When the Volt and Spark EV were being developed I'm sure there were a few turned up mules that were pasting smiles on everyone's faces and rubber all over the road. The power trains can handle substantially more than what they're being allowed to have currently. C'mon, GM.. Let the crazy out. Just a little bit of it. It's been a while since we've had a moddable car outside of the Camaro/Corvette. Remember the hard sell on the EcoTec?
That was back in the day when car engines were not controlled by a computer. These days, if you alter the powertrain, you'd need to alter the software controlling the motor, too. A wide variety of possible modifications would be a nightmare for any software team to try to deal with. And for a hot-rodder working out of his own garage... forget about hacking the software yourself. The upside of using computers to control a car's powertrain, either ICEV or PEV (Plug-in EV), is that it makes the powertrain more efficient. The downside is that it makes many or most modding, including "hot rod" modifications, difficult or impossible.
