People tend to focus on demand, but just getting vehicles like this into production at a profitable cost often turns out to be impossible.

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 one hand I agree. It makes me sad but I'm skeptical they are going to make it.

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.

most profit in autos is in personalization and financing, which in principle you can do at any scale, with whatever fixed costs. I believe these guys are building on top of a Subaru with vendor motors.

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