General Motors built a brilliant electric car in 1996, then crushed it
The EV1 was a sleek two-seat coupe that critics said drove like a real car, decades before electric cars went mainstream. Drivers loved it. They could only lease it, though, and when the program ended GM took the cars back and crushed most of them. Critics have blamed the carmaker ever since for strangling the electric car at birth.
The push came from California. In 1990 its Air Resources Board ordered the seven largest carmakers selling in the United States to make a growing share of their fleets emission-free, starting at two percent by 1998, because the state's air pollution then exceeded that of the other 49 states combined. That same year GM chairman Roger Smith unveiled the Impact concept at the Los Angeles Auto Show, drawing on lessons from GM's Sunraycer, winner of the 1987 World Solar Challenge across Australia.
In 1994 fifty hand-built Impacts were lent to drivers for a week or two. Reviews glowed: Motor Trend called it the only electric vehicle that drove like a real car, and a modified Impact reached 183 mph for a production electric speed record. Yet The New York Times reported that GM was quietly planning for a flop and hoping regulators would drop the deadline.
The production EV1 arrived in 1996 as the first purpose-built, mass-produced electric car from a major American maker. Wind-tunnel work, partial rear wheel skirts and a teardrop plan with the rear wheels nine inches closer together than the front gave it a drag coefficient of just 0.19. Its aluminium spaceframe weighed 290 pounds, 40 percent less than typical steel, and regenerative braking fed energy back into the battery. Leasing began on 5 December 1996 in Southern California and Arizona at 399 to 549 dollars a month; purchase was explicitly forbidden. GM built 660 first-generation cars, then 457 second-generation models from 1998, some with nickel-metal hydride batteries.
An insider estimated each car cost GM around 80,000 dollars to make once research was included. GM concluded electric cars were an unprofitable niche, reclaimed the fleet and ended the program in 2003 despite lessee protests. Critics accused it of protecting spare-parts revenue and blamed oil interests, a story told in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?
Source: General Motors EV1
