Diarmuid O'Connell, Harald Krüger, Neville S. Jackson.

“It is not the vision of this company to produce a mass-market 35,000 dollar car by 2017 – it is the plan.”

Diarmuid O’Connell, Tesla VP for business development, is admirably determined and not shy to look down on those who are not, when he says that “compliance cars” remind him of “toasters” – ouch!
autonews.com, wsj.com

“There are a number of reasons why electric-car business is not so dynamic currently – one of them is that the network of charging stations is not yet as dense as we would like it to be. But we only have a limited influence on that.”

BMW CEO Harald Krüger is obviously hinting at incentives but continued to stress the importance of the i-project for the company as a whole, regardless of sales.
bmwblog.com

“The complexity of adding more gears can deliver you an improvement in overall system efficiency because you are operating in that more efficient area of the electric motor for a longer period of time of the vehicle operation. So sometimes it is worth doing. It does depend on the motor design as they do have different characteristics.”

Prof. Neville S. Jackson, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer at Ricardo, admits that gears improve efficiency. However, gains would only be around 5 percent and thus result in too small an increase of range for it to be worthwhile.
just-auto.com