GM’s EV1 - A car the world should have come to know a bit better.

[Jimmy]

For one thing, the EV1 did not burn a drop of gasoline. That is an advanced capability that the Volt does not have.

[Right Lane Cruiser]

Well, the Volt won't burn any either as long as you stay within its AER.

I still don't see how that makes it less advanced. It has a shorter range to keep the cost down. I still think that if it delivers an honest 40mi AER for the average driver I'll be able to squeeze pretty close to 60mi out of it in ideal circumstances. That means I could go weeks or even months without ever having to add a drop of gas.

[Jimmy]

As I said, the EV1 did not burn a drop of gasoline. The Volt does (or will if it ever gets produced).

[kmactavi]

I agree with Sean here, the ability to go completely electric in addition to having a generator to extend its range is not a loss of an advanced capability. Electricity storage is not yet advanced enough to give the range most consumers need at a price most consumers can afford. This is the solution. The EV range of vehicles will improve as energy storage mediums improve.

Kirk

[flatty]

Although the Roswell/Elvis/sasquatch/HR Haldemann-type conspiracy theories have merit, killing the EV1 might just have been an everyday business decision, badly timed.

A couple of 'minor' knocks against the EV1 might be:

- Oil was $16-$30/barrel between 1998-2003
- $43,000 price
- 2 seats
- It's ugly

Sure, it could have sold on the fringe, like the Insight (and Prius until last year) but Honda, taking a more conservative, inexpensive approach, sold only 18,000 worldwide over 8 years (only with GM-like timing to cancel it on the eve of $4 gasoline!).

That sort of production volume doesn't carry any appeal with large corporations that measure in 100,000s per year.

Toyota brought out a less technical solution, but with greater real world practicality and stuck it out to gather the laurels.

With 20/20 hindsight, the program should have shifted to a more practical 'next gen' that both Honda and GM are scrambling to build today. The lesson in it is to leave 'proof of concept' cars at the proving grounds and focus of meeting your immediate market needs.

According to GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, the worst decision of his tenure at GM was "axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. It didn’t affect profitability, but it did affect image."

"GM R&D chief Larry Burns . . . now wishes GM hadn't killed the plug-in hybrid EV1 prototype his engineers had on the road a decade ago: 'If we could turn back the hands of time,' says Burns, 'we could have had the Chevy Volt 10 years earlier.'"


That all said, we now know that aliens are uncrushing EV1s and driving them around English fields to create crop circles.

[donee]

Hi Flatty,

Ugly Smugly !!!

I hear this old canard all the time with respect to the Prius.

There is a certain beuty to the functional. Anything that makes a car have a CD of .19 in my eyes is beutiful. Because the whole reason for a car is to move people around, and anything that moves people farther on less is ideally car.

You are looking at things with a cultural history, not with a designer's eye. People get used to shapes from their cultural experience. Its the designer that has to reconcile what works with what is to become. And over time, what works becomes culturally beutiful. For example - the Ford Trimotor versus the Douglas DC-3. Look at stuff from the twenties, and you will se the Trimotor, but by the thirties the DC-1,2,3 had become the new symbol of Art Nouveau.

[Harold]

To bad GM did not get better at what they tried to achieve. They would have had them perfected by now? H

[Chuck]

Brief aside on Major League Baseball history (and I don't know much and some of you already know the story).

In 1919, an owner short on money sold a number of his best players to finance a Broadway play....might as well been Damn Yankees as the Red Sox sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees, who would proceed to win 26 World Series before the Red Sox would win their next one.

My point is the EV1 project is GM's curse of the Bambino - they had this technology, forgot it, even sold the rights to the NiMH batteries to Chevron (?). I'll conceed at the time getting an EV1 in 1996 (if allowed) might have been like getting a Tesla today, but GM could have actively continued R&D. Fleets for city,state, local governements, and US Mail could have been test beds for EV and hybrid technology. GM buries it, arrogantly thinking the 1990's of cheap credit and gas will never end.

[diamondlarry]

I got to sit in one in '97 at Disney World. I wish now that I had studied it more and taken some pictures.

[Prius Prime]

It's GONE!!

We went to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn on Jan 4, 2009 and the EV-1 is gone!!!

Tried to find out info and the guards said that GM came and got it. It was on loan from them.

I wonder if they smashed it.

Prius Prime