Why Not Revive the EV1?

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.

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.

A dollar is good for about 7 horsepower hours of energy. Not a bad price but how fast for how long can you go on 7 horsepower hours?

You’ll pay much more in battery replacements. Used cars will be valued by the life left in their batteries and not much else.

Electric cars will cost about a dollar per mile to drive, I’ll stick with my 20 cents.

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.

Something I've never seen is anyone taking into account the amount of energy lost by the car batteries discharging, even when not in use.

A battery has ONLY two states--charge and discharge. If the battery is not being charged, then it IS DISCHARGING, even when not performing it's intended function. Even the most sophisticated and efficient batteries discharge when not in use. And, as batteries age, they will discharge MORE when not in use.

Consider millions of electric car batteries, just sitting between uses, discharging. Gasoline does not simply evaporate out of a car's gas tank. This is one inefficiency that electric cars can never overcome, even with the best technology. The only mitigating factor would be if the cost of the lost electrical energy is ultimately less than the cost of the gasoline.

What you’re claiming (1$/mile) is dated info. Golf cart power? You realize that GM had a vehicle that used 90s technology to do interstate speeds. Horsepower hours isn’t a good way to measure electric motors either. The Volt is the best blend of electric and gas. You keep a good SOC and batteries can last you a really long time. Just ask Ma Bell who’ll keep batteries for 20 years on float voltages before they swap them out for safety concerns.

“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.teslamotors.com/

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.

“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.”

Lutz is supposed to be their car guy, but he sounds like their accountant.

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