What I took away from the article is this. Paul needs to completely revamp his business plan before anyone is going to invest. One of Pauls biggest mistakes was to go for it big right out of the gate and not do what every other manufacturer in recent times, has done. Start off small and grow. A good recent example is Lucid. It took way over $1B just to get that company to where they are today. Even at that, its just a trickle of cars coming out. Just look at Arcimoto. Been in business longer than Elio and has only produced a handful of units. Plus, they are only sold in certain states. Thus, start off small and grow from there.
What else I took away was that Paul had to go electric as nobody is going to invest in gas. Paul realizes this after his years of trying to get investment. So, electric is the only thing left he can do and hope for the best. In essence, the whole program is on paper and not anything tangible. I could come up with the same plan and try to push it on investors and I'd be ahead of Paul. I don't have $215M in debt (soon to be $230M) or a shuttered out of date plant.
Also, another major problem is Paul and his habit of just going silent. That's a horrible PR move and thus, even if he does produce something, people will use a wait and see approach. He has burned so many bridges that it will take years to rebuild them.
People that bought into the Elio really want gas, not electric. Yes, there will be a few that will take electric but that is another slap in the face because we need to be realistic. If Saudi Arabia comes in and gives Paul $1B (essentially what they did with Lucid) they want an Electric EV, not gas. Thus, the electric one will be required to be in production and Elio will need to be making a profit, so they can get back their investment. Only way a gas version can be made, is that when Elio makes it to the point where they have tons of money in their coffers, they can finish their gas version and get it to production. So, how long do you really think that's going to take? As we all know, all of those fixed price gassers will come at a huge loss for Elio. They will need to make sure the electric ones will make up for the gas versions loss. In the real world $7450 is not realistic and the $7K fixed price that people agreed to along with all of those incentives, makes for a massive loss on each gas product by the time they get around to it. Let's not forget, the Elio-E has no WOW factor. Thus, it will need something to make it stand out. The $14,900 price tag is not going to do it.
In the end, nobody is holding back Paul but himself. He caused many of the problems he has today. If there was some secret entity that is holding back new manufacturers, then we would not see Rivian or Lucid today. This secret entity would have shut them down years ago, yet they did not. Same for Tesla.