They've long understood the threat. Look at locomotives. For 50 years they've been electric drive powered by a diesel generator. For a while now they've been vulnerable to having the diesel generator and its fuel tank replaced by batteries and improved further by regenerative braking. Minus the regenerative braking battery powered locomotives have been around since before WWII. Lutz was their to help keep a fail convincingly mode going for Volt and Bolt for GM post bankruptcy. Its the same reason he is at Workhorse to help them sell fail convincingly behind the scenes or try to avoid the exercise all together. The delusion they run under is they will be able to put the genie back in the bottle. That is simply not going to happen. It would be like putting wireless phones back in the bottle and going back to land lines or reducing phones to one way loud speakers. Their game played out for a while. Outside of their Trojan horse for electrics role hybrids were a bad idea especially as set up where they still retained a standard transaxle and direct drive for a ICE engine- fully duplication on top of already horrid complexity. The arrangement of the locomotives was pure. See something similar with electric drive dump trucks. Nothing hybrid about this. Electric drive subs- Electric Boats. They understood the risk but it was all PR games they playing at worse they were trying to delay the demise. Now per GM's Abelson they are trying to move to total defiance announcing all of electrification is on total hold for 20 years. I wonder what dictator promised them that and what kind of idiot it would take to believe that?
