Here is Bob Lutz's answer to the viper:
ABG: Given the emphasis on environmental issues and developing greener cars, this is sort of a tangential question. With Chrysler announcing an updated version of the Viper with 600 horsepower, is GM going to get into a horsepower race with Chrysler?
Lutz: Yeah, probably. Because you say, well, we're schizophrenic. Well, so's the American market, and you've got a portion of the American market that is extremely safety oriented. They say I don't want to hear about anything else except the number of airbags and 5 star rating. Then you've got a whole other part of the population that says 5 star, 5 star, I could care less. I'm not going to have an accident. If it'll give 550 horsepower and 3 second 0 to 60 times. Fuel – I don't use my sports car that much. I don't care if it gets 10 miles per gallon. On a monthly basis, I only use it in the summer on nice days, maybe throughout the whole year, it'll cost me an extra $100.00 in fuel. What do I care? And then you've got, I would say a growing portion of the population that is extremely environmentally conscious, very worried about dependence on foreign oil, very concerned about longer term fuel availability, and those people are a completely different category of customer. But we make a serious intellectual mistake when we oversimplify the situation and say the days of the big sport utilities are over. No, they're not. We're selling as many as we ever did. Now maybe Ford and Chrysler aren't, but we are. The days of the V-8 engine are over. No, they're not. Chrysler's selling more Hemis than they ever sold V-8s in their life, but at the same time it's true that the market is really fragmenting in terms of what people want, and since we try to sell between 4 and 4½ million vehicles a year in the United States, we can't really say, Well, we're not gonna serve you guys because we prefer to do V-8 engines or we're no longer going to serve you Camaro fanatics because we're gonna do everything with batteries or everything small car. What you pose is a very interesting question because a lot of times I do get asked, well are you guys schizophrenic? I mean, on the one hand you've got the Camaro here or the Corvette Z06, but then at the same time you're showing a battery operated vehicle. All I can say is different strokes for different folks, and we do what the market wants.