The GM Impact concept car that you're talking about became the EV1. The story of the rise and fall of the EV1 is chronicled in the film "Who Killed the Electric Car". What isn't mentioned in the film is GM's official reason for eliminating the EV1. "We are no longer making the parts to keep the cars safely on the road" which sounds to me like something a layer fabricated to cover up a bad business decision. By that logic every 1966 Corvette must be rounded up and destroyed because there is no GM factory making so much as a brake shoe (did it have disk brakes?) for the 66 Corvette.
Mechanically the EV1 was a superb car. Every reference I found from ACTUAL EV1 drivers shows it to be the finest thing to come from Detroit in a long time. Maybe that was its problem, it was too good. GM sabotaged the EV1 program from the start. They deliberately only made a few token cars, in an inefficient manner, to keep CARB off their back. The way the EV1 was built: you place the chassis on a stand, 2 guys pull up a cart full of parts. After mounting the parts they go get another cart full, peak production was 4 cars per day. There was no assembly line, no robots, no single task work station etc. When you build cars this way they are going to be expensive. This is how they build Bentley, Rolls Royce and Ferrari cars.
In your case GM has succeeded. They successfully hid the fact that they DID make an electric car, it worked well, the people that had one wanted to keep it. GM doesn't want you to have an electric car, they want you to keep buying trucks and Hummers and SUV's because GM makes the most money of of them.
