Don't think that Elio had the knowledge or interest in the real cost of making a car.How much do cars cost to manufacture? - Quora
Aug 8, 2015 - 'Tooling for a refresh (new body) is typically $200M, a whole new design (generally every 5 years) is about $600M. So if you sell 1 million cars, tooling costs per car are $200 to $600 per car. If it dropped to 100,000, it's $2000 to $6000 per car.'
In my opinion only, those "in the know" already red flagged this ELIO from the get go that it will never see production based on insurmountable task of creating THEN selling an ELIO for 7K!