These things fell apart faster than they could be assembled. The Fox platform might be the only redeeming feature of this car. Beyond that, plan on spending more than a few weekends tearing apart the interior and reassembling it with lots of duct tape behind to hold it together.

Neutral: Harley Needs A Lifeline

I can’t recall the model, but one of Suzuki’s kei models back in the late 80s / early 90s was pushing > 50 hp out of a 500cc twin cam design (That’s getting into 100 hp/L territory, which back then was pretty lofty)  

It’s not just that their marketing is trash, they are often releasing solutions so far ahead of when they’re ready for mass manufacture that it hurts their reputation.  (and yes, I remember some of their “first shot” releases you mention - great ideas that had an annoying tendency to fall apart prematurely)

TBH, the Espace looks a lot more like the Aerostar to my eye:

Is there anything that China hasn’t made a knock-off of? 

These things were one of the few times that GM got something right. The design itself was actually unique (for once), it looked good, and there was a ton of actually decent work in them - including adopting the body technology developed for Saturn’s early models.

This thing is an exercise in “reduced weight = greater fuel efficiency”, right?

The only way one of these at this price would get a NP from me is if it was a prototype with a rotary engine in it.  At a wild guess that’s never gonna happen. 

Overall, they were comparable with the Toyota and Nissan products of the time. Unreliable crap by today’s standards, but not necessarily all that bad either.

I’m pretty sure finding partners would be ... challenging. 

No - ergonomics _are_ important in any car - perhaps more so in a high performance car. Controls need to be at hand, and not ambiguous to operate.

Hard CP for me. It’s still way too far up the depreciation cliff these things inevitably fall off. Between that, and the seemingly inevitable string of peculiar failures that happen in high strung cars from these manufacturers, this thing is basically a money pit with less chance of recouping it than a house from an…

This is more he said/she said rhetoric. The problem I’m having with this is twofold:

That’s entirely subjective.  I personally don’t like their design direction since BMW took them over. 

I actually think that’s quite well done. I still think the car itself is absolutely ugly.

I’d consider buying it, but there’s no way in heck I’m going to spend that kind of money on one of these.

Around here, they call it “traffic calming measures”.  Ugh - I hate that term. 

Speed bumps don’t hurt your car?

Right ... a Cylon and a furnace had a love child ... and then they beat it with an ugly stick.