Who is familiar with EV1 and "Who killed the electric car?"?

Question

And if so...where you moved or what?! AWESOME movie, awesome car!! Why haven't we moved on to this technology? Hybrids are not all that great! :-\

The only thing is that the EV1s were kind of ugly. But so what? I would buy one, if I could be gas free.

Answer 1

Have seen it, wasn't that impressed the EV1 was always meant to be a test that is why the users had to sign fixed leases given the technology at the time each vehicle was worth many times what they were leased for, it was only ever meant as test bed/field test for a future car, like the GM-Volt.

Answer 2

The market killed the EV1.  They simply were not competitive with conventional cars, and only existed because of a government mandate.  When the mandate was withdrawn, the EV1 went to the scrape pile.

Answer 3

Quite an eye opener!

Just goes to show how much influence the petroleum industry really has.  If your still interested in an electric car, check out the Tesla, it's a sporty, high performance vehicle just put on the market by some entrepreneurs in California.

Answer 4

The Ev1 “cost” according to GM was about $80,000 each the least price was based on a retail price of 33,995 to $43,995 (US) for that price you could buy a 2008 Cadillac CTS, or you could buy a Toyota Corolla for between 15,250 and 20,000 leaving you with between  13,000 and 28,000 for gas so even at $5 per gallon of gas that’s about  2,600 gallons of fuel or about 78,000 miles to break even assuming you pay nothing for the electricity. Now add the range problem, your range is about 100 miles, and if better not get too cold the batteries become less efficient as it get colder, so your range will suffer.

Let’s talk about politicians for a moment, do you really want someone else telling you what you can and can’t buy? What you can and can’t do?  Think hard before you answer, Yes? Oh good then a politician can do all the “good” things that need to be done, like save the environment, and reduce health costs right? Then you wouldn’t mind say a 20 MPH speed limit, think of the number of lives that would save and how much money we’d save on health care, and there should be a law that say you MUST work out at least 30 minutes a day five days a week, and you can’t drink alcohol at all, no drugs, and skiing, why you might hurt yourself so you can’t ski, skateboard, and music can’t play it too loud you might hurt your hearing so there should be a law against loud music, and My Space, can’t have that either why someone might use that information to take advantage of someone or steal their identity, on and on. Just because you think something is a good idea doesn’t mean everyone thinks it’s a good idea. Do you really want to know what a politician’s job is? It’s to get re-elected.

If you really want a solution, look up algae oil. Here I’ll do it for you. Go here

http://biorefining.cfans.umn.edu/main.ph...

Electric cars can be a PART of the solution, but not the solution itself. This isn’t going to be one solution but many, you may see people with two cars, one electric on gas power.

Oh I’d like a like link to where Bush get 17 billion a year from lobbying and special interest groups, I think you mean that lobbyist and special interest groups spent 17 billion.

Answer 5

your right awesome movie

Just goes to show who really has

the power in this country.

Answer 6

people who sooo love the ev 1 know nothing about it.....the cost ,,the purpose,, the performance....keep dreaming....

Answer 7

I drove one of the first prototype EV1's It had no power. It was ugly and the list price was too rich.

Answer 8

That's a pretty biased movie.  It put all the blame on GM.  What about Toyota, Honda, and Ford?  They all made electric vehicles at the same time and stopped producing them before GM did.

If you want to drop $100k on a over sized golf cart that couldn't pass any of our current crash standards go for it.  The range was extremely limited to the point of being useless for a large amount of people.  Even with prices that high they still lost huge amounts of money on every car.  The whole point of a company is to make money.

Toyota and Honda lost several thousand on every hybrid car they sold for years until the battery technology improved and brought the prices down.  Even now those batteries are about $2k each and last about 100-150k miles before they need to be replaced at which point the new battery is worth more than your car.

ilove - Yes ethanol from sugar is better than from corn.  However look at our climate.  We cant grow large amounts of sugarcane in the US.  We would need to import sugar from tropical climates that can grow it.  We can grow large amounts of corn which makes it more practical although still very costly and most likely a poor investment.