Make a cube of that side, a cubic meter. Fill that with water near the sea level and you get a volume of 1 Liter of water.
There are 1000L in a cubic meter, not one.
Neither GM nor Chrysler will "get it". Why should they? They have governed by finance pros instead of by engineers.
I'm an engineer, and the marketing department at my company will always get over double the budget of my design dept. This is normal, and simply a question of marketing. It has nothing to do with any mismanagement of GM at all, actually. Seth Godin's blog, although usually vague and general, gives a bit of insight into this matter. Moral of the story: People don't buy what's best, people buy what they want. GM is just providing an option to cater to something people would want, and making good money doing it. It's not like they were sacrificing any performance for the add-on. If anything, they're managing their resources even better by doing this.
Hackers of the world, unite!