I get 50 cars a day for 200 working days, which used to be the standard automotive year, allowing for weekends and shutdowns.
I worked in Ford's axle plant in the sixties. Our normal production rate was 10,000 carsets a day, or 2 million a year. That was for all car and light truck lines combined, so figure 1/10 of that, or 1000 cars a day, or 200,000 cars a year, for a successful line.
Further corroboration: GM killed the fourth generation Camaro/Firebird for low sales, and they sold an average of almost 80,000 cars a year for model years 1996..2001.
By way of illumination, Corvette sales for the same period averaged 27,427 cars/year. We know the Corvette survives partly as a flagship and partly because of a lot of internal and external zealots.
Let's look at a lower production car; the Porsche Boxster, of which just over 200,000 have been built in 14 years, for an average of 14,285/year.
Are there enough green zealots who will _say_ they'll buy 10,000 tiny, slow cars a year? Probably. Will they pay somewhere upward of $50,000 for it? Probably not. Could anyone build it to sell for less than that? Not if they have to buy any tooling.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
