Smithsonian Removes EV1 Exhibit
(I wanted an electric car but here is some good history why they are too dangerous for the average J6P to resolve some of your issues with ths conspiracy thoery I have read you post about before)
science.slashdot.org
Posted by Zonk on Friday June 16, @08:25PM
from the wave-good-bye dept.
johnMG writes to mention a Seattle PI article on the Smithsonian's move to remove the EV1 electric sedan from display. From the article:
"The upcoming film 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th. GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display."
Some choice comments that agree with your general theory El Mat:
who stands to lose the most?(Score:5, Insightful)
by zogger (617870) on Friday June 16, @09:02PM (#15552907)
(http://technocrat.net/ | Last Journal: Monday August 22, @11:57AM)
Electric cars can be quite fast. Electric motors have all their torque starting at one rpm and it just goes on from there. There isn't a fuel engine made that can compare horsepower to horsepower down where the rubber meets the road with an electric motor. People who managed to *lease* an EV1 loved them (EV1's were leased, not sold for the most part), they tried their darndest to get GM to sell them at end of lease and GM just took them away and crushed them while they were still in perfect working order. Read up on it, or actually go see that movie in the article, that is what this is all about.
Electric cars are a threat to auto makers because there is much less stuff to break and they are simpler to make (think about that one for a long time, it is a critical part of the equation), and they are a threat to governments because there is no way to apply the road fuel tax to them (short of the GPS tracking deal they just started in oregon). You can theoretically own an electric vehicle, own some solar panels, and eventually be driving for pretty darn cheap per mile. Many people are happily doing that today, proving it is possible and can fill a lot of niche driving. As to range,50-100 miles on a charge is doable *now*, which would handle just millions of commuter profiles, that is *easily* extended and handled by having an additional tow behind trailer with a fuel burning generator in it for trips, which would then morph your ride "on demand" into a hybrid vehicle..
Pure electric cars are a clear cut example of what is called "disruptive technology" that threatens big auto, big oil and big government. A lot of big money and big juice there that doesn't want that sort of threat, yes? That is why electric cars "failed",not that they don't work or can't be built in mass productyion style, of course they can,but they were never offered in the first place.
Now El Mat for the engineers response:
The reason the electric car died . . .(Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16, @08:59PM (#15552893)
. . . was very, very simple. GM couldn't make any money from them. They knew that going into the project, they knew it when they were making prototypes under the "Impact" name, etc., etc. Thirty thousand dollar loss per vehicle.
So why did they make them at all?
Well, California was going to impose a zero-emissions vehicle standard, that required a fixed percentage of the vehicles sold in California from every manufacturer be zero emissions. GM figured it could own the Californian market if it could put together a from-the-ground-up electric car, while companies like Chrysler were doing things jurry-rigging electric Voyager minivans. After all, if GM were able to dominate the electric car market, then the percentage-of-sales rule would allow it to dominate the normal auto market in California. Who cares if you're losing thirty thousand dollars per vehicle on a couple of percent of the Californian auto market, if you simultaneously wind up with much higher, law-guarnateed market share on profitable cars?
So, after GM puts in all this investment, California repeals the law just as it's going to go into effect, leaving GM with no way to actually make a profit from the vehicles. They go ahead with the program anyway (it's too late to save much money, since the tooling was already ordered on year-plus lead times), they recoup some cash leasing the cars), and then when the liability calculations make it cheaper to recycle and scrap than continue to lease or sell them, they got rid of them.
Five gets you ten that the movie comes up with some wild-ass conspiracy theory involving oil company influence at GM, though. After all, when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace, it has to be the fault of Big Evil Corporations.
groups.google.com;
Ciszek) wrote:
>In the 90's GM produced a line of electric cars called the EV1
>that had a following of hard core fans in California, Tom
>Hanks and Mel Gibson among them. These cars had no trouble
>accelerating and keeping up in California traffic, and once
>they went from lead-acid to NiMH batteries, the range between
>charging was 130 miles. None of these cars were sold, however,
>only leased. Once US Automakers managed to defeat California's
>"zero emissions" requirement, GM quit renewing leases, repossessed
>the cars, and destroyed them. A bunch of fans of the cars offered
>GM $1.9 million for the last 78 used EV1's that were sitting in a
>lot, but they were taken away and crushed. GM kept insisting
>that no one wanted to buy the cars.
Some facts about the EV1, the research and development of which
was produced by _my_ division of GM, Hughes Electronics:
General Motors lost two billion dollars on the project, and lost
money on every single EV1 produced. The leases didn't even cover
the costs of servicing them.
The range of 130 miles is bogus. None of them ever achieved that
under normal driving conditions. Running the air conditioning or
heater could halve that range. Even running the headlights
reduced it by 10%.
Minimum recharge time was two hours using special charging
stations that except for fleet use didn't exist. The effective
recharge time, using the equipment that could be installed in a
lessee's garage, was eight hours. Home electrical systems simply
couldn't handle the necessary current draw for "fast" charging.
NiMH batteries that had lasted up to three years in testing were
failing after six months in service. There was no way to keep
them from overheating without doubling the size of the battery
pack. Lead-acid batteries were superior to NiMH in actual daily
use.
Battery replacement was a task performed by skilled technicians
taking the sorts of precautions that electricians do when working
on live circuits, because that's what they were doing -- working
on live circuits. You cannot turn batteries "off." This is the
reason the vehicles were leased, rather than sold. As long as
the terms of the lease prohibited maintenance by other than a
Hughes technician, GM's liability in the event of a screw-up was
much reduced. Technicians can encounter high voltages in hybrid
vehicles. In the EV1, there were _really_ high voltages present.
Lessees were complaining that their electric bills had increased
to the point that they'd rather be using gasoline.
One of the guys I worked with transferred to the EV1 program
after what was by then a division of Raytheon lost the C-130 ATS
contract. He's now back working for us. He has some interesting
stories, none of them good, though he did like the
company-subsidized apartment in Malibu. He said the car was a
dream to drive, if you didn't mind being stranded between
Bakersfield and Barstow on a hot July afternoon when a battery
blew up from the combined heat of the day and the current draw. |
