The Bolt looked nearly as dorky and they sold plenty of those. Even with the battery recall. I doubt GM made much if any profit though. LG chemicals sure didn't.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.
If range was the main criteria, of course it's not competitive.
In weight (or lack of a weight penalty), power efficiency, vehicle handling dynamics, and size efficiency it was hugely competitive - for miles per kWh, it was not surpassed until the current get Ioniq/EV6 came out.
Someone pointed out thought - in a scenario where you charge your car nightly like your phone, absolute range (and thus excessively large/heavy battery packs) should not be a main consideration. And one would think that the I3's carbon fiber chassis should need a much smaller battery to equal or surpass the range of a Cybertruck, for example.
I can forgive price and range, because those are the sort of things that come with a company's first generation of EVs. But they didn't get anything else about it right. It's almost as though they were trying to have it fail so they could say "look, nobody wants EVs".
The newer versions look OK. But all of them are a little chrome heavy IMHO. It can look nice on larger cars, but because the bolt is so small, all the accents and flourishes seem jumbled together.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.