Dividing the total R&D costs
Dividing the total R&D costs for electric vehicles by the number of volts sold to date is a completely ridiculous concept and hence produces a completely ridiculous outcome. That R&D will go into tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of cars, with sales accelerating rapidly the R&D "costs" will halve per vehicle over the next 12 months alone. Similarly dividing the tooling costs by the number of vehicles sold so far is just as meaningless. If the R&D and tooling cost just for the sake of argument say they've spent 500 million on electric vehicle R&D and tooling, by their logic the first car off the line cost GM $500 million dollars, utterly ridiculous.
This is nothing but a poorly thought through talking point by those who are either mathematically challenged or are feigning it for political or business purposes.