Yesterday at lunch me and my coworkers were sitting around talking about the economy and gas prices and the topic of hybrids came up. One of my coworkers mentions something about a movie he heard about called "Who killed the electric car?" that talks about how electric cars were at one point there were electric cars on the road that got yanked out by the company that made them. He didn't know too many of the details so I went online last night and downloaded it and watched it. Great documentary.

The basic story is, GM released a fully functional electric car called the EV1 in 1996. 1996! The program was eventually stopped in 2003 and all but a few of the produced EV1's were crushed by GM. Why did this happen? You have to either watch the movie or do some research to get the whole story but the jist of it is, California's CARB was too pussy to stand up for their own ZEV mandate and crumbled under pressure from the auto manufacturers and big oil. Once you see the movie and read the facts, you'll be left scratching your head going, "What the fuck? Why am I not driving an electric car right now with these sky high gas prices."


Here are some links:

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
General Motors EV1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GM VOLT and Chevy-Volt hoax: By General Motors, which Killed the Electric Car

 

what I think is amazing is they scrapped this car, and yet they are almost unable to make anything but huge gas hogs .. and honestly, I am not sure if GM will be around in 18 months.. i bet they will regret cancelling that car if that happens.

also makes me wonder why it so hard to get an EV to market at a decent price when they did it 10 years ago.

 

Back in 96 EV technology was super expensive. Nickel Metal Hydride batteries were even heavier and costlier to produce than they are today. Since at the time there wasn't a wide-spread demand for EVs (other than in California) the General decided it was too expensive of a project and scrapped it.

Now that gas is nearing $5/gallon and Hybrid/EV cars are in high demand, I bet they're rethinking the decision.

 

What sucks that even 10 years ago it wasn't that affordable. It was only available as a lease and marked in the $40k price range on the window sticker.

A 150mi range EV for sub-20k would sell like hotcakes.

Here's hoping they can lower the costs of Li-Ion technology so this can happen in the next decade.

 

They had electric car sback in the 70's, what you kids have to remember is that this is not the first gas crisis, not the first time wind power/wave power/whatever power has been tried. the only difference is that the technology is a little better today than it was back then which makes some ideas a little closer to reality. What really killed the electric car was practicality. You don't use gasoline but your electric bill goes to the moon, and the pollution from the tailpipe is transferred to the power station so there's no net gain in that area either. Plus, with all of the rolling blackouts during the summer, during peak driving times BTW, you can't keep the thing charged anyway.
That's what really killed the electric car.

 

See, I don't take the "it was too expensive to make" argument with much merit because GM never gave it a chance. Yes, the technology was more expensive but when is a new technology ever cheap the first time around? There's financial risk involved in being the first to market anything. In the documentary, you see that the original owners of the EV1 tried to buy out their lease and GM wouldn't let them. They absolutely did not want to mass produce the car and that's what made it so expensive for them to make. I think this is one of the biggest blunder in automotive history.

Imagine what kind of mileage GM's version of a Prius would get today had its EV program remained active.

 

I think at the time, since there was not high enough demand GMs economists assumed that if this were to work, they would be taking a huge hit, and what was the incentive?? Once the EV is realeased, another company could come along dissect it and remake it with a tweak as to not copy the patent. Free riders were probably one of their biggest concerns, especially in a time when demand for bigger vehicles was on the rise.

 

I agree with USFslim, in California, several years ago the legislature passed a bill that said something like, 25% of the vehicles sold there had to be hybrid/ electric whatevers, if you don't sell those cars, California will not let you sell ANY cars there. The problem was nobody wanted them as they were expensive and gas was still relatively cheap, many of these cars were sold at a loss (I'm not sure that the Prius is not one of them) there was no market. The state started rolling over almost imediately on this law. Then "poof" in 7 months time, there's a market.

I'm sorry, I meant "The People's Republik of California"

 

I've actually got this movie Dl'd on my computer. Pretty good documentary.