Does anyone remember saturn's electric car?

Question

It came out in 96. Anyone know if they are gonna be produced again? I know a bunch of people leased them when they were made but were forced to turn them in after the lease ended and all the cars except one were crushed.

Answer 1

They don't have the range to be useful.

Answer 2

Wow, everybody but irish are wrong so far.  

It was NOT more expensive to operate, it was dirt cheap to operate.  Recharging away from home was FREE.  

The range was fine, most people drive <40 miles a day, and homebrew EVs get that.  The EV1 got 120+ miles.  People were scared, "what if I need to drive 200 miles", yes, that's what ZipCar or Hertz are for.

GM did use the Ovonics NIMH batteries in the EV1.  The batteries would probably have lasted the life of the car.  Chevron bought Ovonics, but (as Cobasys) they will sell you an EV pack today. Their batteries are in the Saturn hybrids.

http://www.cobasys.com/products/transpor...

The auto industry can sell ANYTHING. Why else would a soccer mom want to drive a truck!?  (SUV=truck).  They made no real effort to market EVs, much the opposite.  CARB mandated 10% of California's cars be electric. The industry wanted to weasel out.  They coundn't prove they were impossible to build, so they could only try to prove no one wanted them.  Thus they scuttled their marketing efforts, and tried to talk people out of buying them.

General Motors is now eating crow, and going "Wish we hadn't abandoned the EV1" because now they're developing the EV 2.0, the Chevy Volt.  This time with a small gas/diesel engine to recharge the batteries on the road, solving the range problem.

They actually modified an EV1 with an onboard engine, a jet engine from Williams International.  Thing got like 80 mpg.

Answer 3

Mike you are wrong.

The car was affordable and cheaper to operate.

The rechargable batteries put in the cars were inferior  to the batteriy technology that GM bought from Ovonics. Those batteries were fantastic and could outlast the car, but GB sold the technology to chevron and the project was burried.

the range was about 50 miles, which is plenty for the average person in their daily routines.

Yes the market wanst there, but that is because none of the car companies "really" advertised, because CA was forcing them to make these cars and they didnt want to. So they did everything they could to make it fail, then repoed all of the cars and smashed them out in the Arizona desert.

Answer 4

watch the movie "who killed the electric car" it's all about the scam government and why the gas companys were losing money to the cars so they were banned. ... it'll p**s you off...

Answer 5

Essentially the electric car was too expensive to operate.

The cost to recharge the batteries was too high.

The range was too short.

The life of the batteries was too short and they cost thousands of dollars to replace.

Essentially the only market for the electric car was a group of fanatics that were willing to pay for the privilege of driving an electric car no matter how much it cost.

Unfortunately that group of people was too small to support the production of the electric car.

There was no conspiracy to kill the electric car. It was just too expensive to operate.