Ping!.............
Ping!.............
It looked like a first gen Saturn.
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.
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.
What obstacles stand in the way of Western nations, particularly the United States, reducing their dependency on foreign oil?
James Woolsey
If you remember, we got interested in alternative fuel firms like the Synfuels Corporation in the late seventies and then in 1985, the Saudi’s dropped the oil down to $5 a barrel and bankrupted the Synfuels Corporation. The good news is that they bankrupted the Soviet Union, too, but they certainly undercut alternative fuel efforts. People got interested in alternative fuels again in the early nineties, then in the late nineties, oil dropped down to $10 a barrel and people lost interest, again. One of the things that we have to do is make sure that this rollercoaster effect can’t happen again.
Some people think it will be much more difficult in the future because the Saudi Arabian oil fields could be peaking, if not now then soon. We will also have huge demand, not only from the West but from India and China as they start to produce middle classes that drive cars. So the Saudis might not be able to drop the price to five or ten dollars a barrel by turning on their excess capacity, but they might be able to drop it to $20 per barrel. Most of the better of these alternative fuels are only really viable, (as far as we can see) if oil is say $35 per barrel or more. The one that’s viable even below that is electricity, because off peak, overnight electricity in many parts of the United States sells for between two to four cents per kilowatt hour. That is the equivalent to about a penny a mile driving where as gasoline is in the range of ten to 20 cents a mile at today’s price. However much the Saudis might be able to drop the price of oil by turning on excess capacity, I doubt if they would be able to undercut off peak electricity in price.
But one way to ensure that is to make sure some of these other fuels, such as diesel from waste and cellulosic ethanol or butanol, have a chance to develop without the Saudis bankrupting them. We also need a different structure for subsidies. Today, ethanol is being subsidized even though it doesn’t need to be with oil that’s $60-$70 per barrel. What we might do is say, no subsidies unless oil drops to say $40 dollars a barrel. You start with small subsidies and then the subsidies get larger as the price of oil goes down. Now, most people are not forecasting oil to go below $40 a barrel now, so this might be an easier thing to implement. It would essentially be an insurance policy against the Saudis doing what they did in ‘85 and what happened again in the late 1990s.
Let me return to the potential for hybrid technology in cars, particularly plug-in hybrids. There’s nothing to keep a car from being both a hybrid and a flexible-fuel vehicle, sometimes it’s driving all electric, sometimes it’s driving as a hybrid, and it may be that instead of the liquid fuel part of its energy being supplied by gasoline, it might be supplied by e-85 ethanol whether it’s butanol or renewable diesel. My Prius today gets just under 50 miles per gallon, but if that were to become a plug-in Prius, with six times the capacity battery, and I could drive it about twenty miles before it goes into its regular hybrid mode, then I could get a little over 100 miles per gallon.
Now, if the liquid fuel that I’m using were e-85, because the hybrid is also a flexible fuel vehicle, I would getting over 500 miles per gallon of petroleum product. That is not all that far off because we know how to make e-85. It’s on sale at several hundred stations in the United States. We know how to make flexible fuel vehicles; we’ve got millions on the road. We know how to make hybrids, and, at least in California, people are already upgrading hybrids to be plug-in hybrids, so none of this requires a Manhattan project to invent something entirely new; it’s a matter of getting things into production that we already essentially understand how to do.
I am saving for one of these beauties.
http://www.aptera.com
From Wikipedia (a source I do not normally cite, and do not personally trust):
Of particular concern to the company was the likelihood that each leased car's battery packs would require replacement at 25-35,000 mile intervals...
GM believes that... the EV1 was doomed when the expected breakthrough in battery technology did not take place. In fact, the NiMH battery packs (or Ovonic Battery) that were expected to dramatically improve range came with their own set of problems; GM had to use a less-efficient charging algorithm (lengthening charge times) and waste power on air conditioning to prevent the battery packs from overheating...
The Gen 1 cars got 55 to 75 miles (90 to 120 km) per charge with the Delco-manufactured lead-acid batteries, 75 to 100 miles (120-to-160 km) with the Gen 2 Panasonic lead-acid batteries, and 75 to 150 miles (120 to 240 km) per charge with Gen 2 Ovonic nickel-metal hydride batteries. Recharging took as much as eight hours for a full charge (although one could get an 80% charge in two to three hours). The battery pack consisted of 26 of 12 V, 60 Ah lead-acid batteries holding 67.4 MJ (18.7 kWh) of energy or 26 13.2-volt, 77 Ah nickel-metal hydride batteries which held 95.1 MJ (26.4 kWh) of energy.
[Just throwing some numbers around, but Sears lists automotive batteries at costs from $60 to $190. An electric car would probably require a quality battery, but let's assume that volume production (every EV1 would require new batteries every 30K miles) would reduce costs, so let's split the difference - that's $125 per replacement battery. 26 x $125 = $3,250 (plus labor & tax). And that's every 25K-35K miles (not to mention the fact that the nickel-metal hydride batteries would without a doubt be even more expensive - and GM swapped over to the NiMH batteries for a reason). Know anyone who wants a required $3,700 (or much higher) automotive maintenance bill every two years, or their car becomes a lawn ornament? Heck, a lot of folks would have to take out a loan just for the maintenance...]
Ardent supporters of electric vehicles have been very vocal about the EV1 program's demise. Of particular interest is the leasing program which formally required the vehicles to be returned to GM at lease expiry. General Motors stated reason for the lease-only option was that, as the modern era's first ground-up electric vehicle, the EV1 could not be expected to maintain its performance level (or affordability in regard to maintenance) over the long run... While many lessees and prospective owners have complained about the lease-only availability of the EV1, it is important to note that each leased vehicle was in effect heavily subsidized by General Motors. The car was very popular with its lessees, but it was not known if anyone would have purchased a new electric vehicle at the time had it been offered for sale even at a "break even" price of US$35,000-40,000 [in then current dollars].
FWIW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EV1
There's more to the scam, of course, but it's a good start.
“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.””
Yet right now, new car companies are working on their electric cars.
The Tesla, scheduled to cost over $80,000. Fisker “Karma” scheduled to cost $80,000.
http://www.fiskerautomotive.com/
GM continues to be run by old industry hacks, in Michigan. GM tells what they can’t do. GM has been and continues to be run by accountants.
Tesla and Fisker are in California. The new companies are based on doing something.