Ping!.............
Posted on 06/30/2008 10:23:46 AM PDT by Red Badger
It could travel 150 miles without using a drop of gasoline, accelerate from zero to sixty mph in about eight seconds, and handled crisply. Total cost? Below $40,000, in monthly lease payments sometimes as low as $299. In a world of $4 gas, it sounds like the car that could save General Motors.
There's only one problem.
Every single one of these cars was sent to the crusher in 2003.
The EV1, GM's short-lived electric car experiment, was cancelled when gas was selling for slightly more than one dollar per gallon. Now, with gas four times as expensive, consumers demanding fuel-efficient small cars, and the General peering back at dealer lots filled with unsold SUVs and pondering mergers and perhaps even bankruptcy, some are wondering…why not bring it back?
Veteran automotive journalist John McElroy of Autoline Detroit writes on Autoblog, "The car is already designed, engineered and developed. Why not milk more money out of your intellectual property? All they would have to do is dust off the CAD data." Production couldn't begin tomorrow. Suppliers would have to be lined up, contracts negotiated, factories retrofitted. But that's true of any new car design. "GM could bring the EV1 back into production far faster than a typical new program would take." McElroy remembers the EV1 as "a terrific little car, fast off the line, with crisp handling and a driving experience unlike anything else on the road."
GM product development czar Bob Lutz, however, says the option isn't on the table. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lutz was asked about bringing back the EV1 in a recent email exchange. His reply: "The EV will not meet any current safety laws. Putting a version into production that meets regulations would put us out to ’11 or ’12. They cost us well over $80,000 to produce, and, being a two-seater, we could only sell 800 in four years. We lost over one billion dollars on that experiment."
The EV1 is also a sore spot for GM executives because of the publicity surrounding the program's failure. The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? sparked conspiracy theories about the death of the EV1 that made the vehicle a public relations problem for GM years after the last EV1 was pulled off the road.
The Chicago Sun-Times' Jim Mateja says, however, that the experiment of the EV1 lives on -- in the 2010 Chevy Volt. "Unlike EV1, which went up to 80 miles before an 8-hour recharge with lead-acid batteries or up to 120 miles before a 4-hour recharge with the improved nickel-metal-hydride batteries, Volt can go up to 40 miles before a 1 to 2 hour, if that, recharge," he writes. "And after the 40 battery miles, Volt will go up to 600 more miles because a small engine powered by E85, biodiesel, gas or a fuel cell will run a generator to recharge" the batteries.
Reviving the EV1 may not save GM. But the lessons learned from the vehicle very well may, in the form of the Volt.
Ping!.............
It looked like a first gen Saturn.
I dunno, I think it looked a lot like an Olds Aurora...........
If the Aurora were viewed through the Hubble space telescope.
The Saturn EV1 should look like a Saturn.
Why do they always have to make these cars so damned ugly?
Tyranny of the wind tunnel.
It look more like a car than the Prius; even if that car would be a Citroen.
150 miles, my butt! Get an engineering degree. That thing coudn’t go more than 60 miles or so...and to do that you had to have no A/C, no nuttin! GM junked the cars because they were junk. Given GM’s present state, methinks all the true engineers have bolted, leaving only the MBAs that got GM in to it’s present mess.
Self portrait of the designers............
So that it will be a status symbol for yuppie liberals.
LOL. I got a good laugh from that. Thanks!
EV1 was ten years before it’s time. If it had been marketed now demand would probably be HUGE even with it’s disadvantages. Ten years ago most people (consumers) weren’t thinking ahead so demand wasn’t as big as it would be now.
Also ten years ago operating cost on the EV1 came out higher per year then a gas powered economy car. Now my Chevy Metro costs me about 13 cents per mile to operate. An EV1 would run me about 6 cents per mile.
A ten year old EV1 (if they would have stayed in the market) would have run me a lot less to purchase then a new one off the lot (an a LOT less then the current Hybrids)
One of the biggest complaints was it’s limited range. Well most households have multiple cars. Use the EV1 (or other electric) for daily driving and keep your gas powered longer range vehicle for those weekend excursions or times when the EV1 don’t run (North Dakota winters).
I could care less about enviro-whacko concerns. I do care about money out of my pocket though, and I care that every time I fill up my gas tank I’m sending a portion of that money to other nations who are not our friends, and some times enemies.
Something I rarely see in all these true elec car stories is the cost of electricity to charge them. All the green proponents of elec cars want you to believe the juice is somehow free or cleaner or both.
“If the Aurora were viewed through the Hubble space telescope.”
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