“The automotive industry as a whole has evolved towards having separate contractors design and supply many different components (e.g. Delphi, Valeo, Bosch, BorgWarner, Getrag). So the article’s assumption that GM would be building the batteries from scratch all by itself is rather striking in its fundamental ignorance of how the industry operates – and also ignorant of months-old developments in the Volt story.”

The is true of almost ANY manufacturer of complexity. If you were talking about a Caterpillar Bulldozer, many of the parts on that Dozer would be made by outside contractors, this is but one example, but it goes w/o saying.

That’s why that article that quoted, of all people, a University professor, who obviously has no idea what he’s talking about caused such controversy.

We have a large ship builder near where I live that builds our Nuclear aircraft carriers. In fact the only facility in the U.S. that builds them. When they were having difficulty in the 90′s the local news interviewed an Economics professor from a local university that suggested they start building merchant marine ships.

The local paper ran an article about his comments, and interviewed many shipbuilding experts from around the nation who could not believe his comments, and outlined why that would not be the thing to do, and suggested he really didn’t know what he was talking about. Turns out he didn’t.

A few contractual changes, including contract work on repairing navy vessels and 3 new carrier contracts and the shipyard was back on it’s feet.

Just a case in point.