The price of admission is very high.

If you want to go custom, then, even if you buy most of the mechanicals off-the-shelf (buy engines from Ford, suspensions from VW, whatever), and even if you license somebody's chassis, you will have to spend a lot of money in chassis engineering.

That costs a lot of money, which means that you won't be able to sell as many units as you want.

Then you have regulatory hurdles, like crash testing. You will have to sacrifice a couple of your first cars for crash testing.

Now let's say you want to go high-volume. Mass production costs a horrible amount of money, for example, the engine plant for the new Chevy Volt is going to cost over $300 million when completed. Even to put out one lousy car, you are looking at hundreds of millions in investments.

Then you have to worry about a sales network. You will either have to build your own, or convince existing dealers to carry your product line. Even if you don't build your own, you'll have to build a lot of cars just to make sure there's a couple at each dealership, again, a lot of money.

Basically, the main constraint is that it costs a lot of money. Everything else is doable. Vehicle tax concerns are usually along usage and fuel economy lines, so everyone building the same type of car ends up paying the same kind of tax.

The environmental restrictions are not new, so there's nothing to complain there. It just costs money to follow them. Same goes for CAFE, it is not a new rule, and it is an average of your whole fleet, so there are ways to soften the blow.

Market presence is not really an issue. With clever marketing you can easily introduce a new brand. Just look at how quickly the Saturn brand was established simply by providing a different dealership experience. Too bad that didn't save them from the axe.

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