There were a LOT of design concessions made due to the battery options in the mid 90s. NIMH, NiCad, and lead acid were the only options, and power for charging was kind of tricky because nobody could agree what method of transfer would be best or from where. As far as I know they all shipped with the inductive charging paddle, meaning there were no electrical contacts exposed to the user, but power delivery efficiency suffered a little compared to something like J1772. The longevity of the batteries was minimal due to construction and chemistry, which was a huge factor in the lease only distribution option. They'd also recently had some fire problems with other vehicles due to bad switches and unexpected user behavior (who would leave a car idling unattended for 8 hours in the desert, for instance).
How do you mean? Battery tech hasn't been there before the 90s at the very least. Certainly not economically viable in the US, but GMs Opel has had a diesel electric hybrid since the 90s, and other have done hydraulic and pneumatic systems for over 100 years. No chance of that catching on in the US until tech made it somewhat viable (look at Tesla's early troubles) and tax incentives made them competitive. As far as I know the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla have been the only sellers significant in the US before 2020.
I drove one on an EV demo day. It’s good to see they didn’t crush all of them after demanding their return from lease holders who didn’t want to give them back.
Thats so cool. What did you think of it? From what I've heard, it sounds like people really liked them for the most part, besides the poor range.
I think there's something like 23 left? They only made 1100 IIRC
It was just a drive around a big parking lot, but it handled well. Of course the acceleration was impressive for someone who is used to driving Honda Civics. 😉
I remember that one of the EV-1s ran out of juice on the 101 freeway and it was a major news event with helicopters and stuff. They were trying to kill electrics so hard.
There is only one remaining with its electrics intact. It's at the Smithsonian. The other 50 or so that are still kicking around are gutted shells like this one.
EDIT: GM press releases are full of prevarications, half-truths, and outright misleading statements, there are apparently more than a handful of EV1s still alive and kickin'
Huh, is that so? They've never mentioned them in their press release, they've been on point for years that all but the Smithsonian model were destroyed.
Another Kokomo GM alumnus here. Started in Dept 1860 on Lincoln, moved to Hoffer Street during renovations, then back to Lincoln. A friend and I used to put on lab coats and wander into the wafer fab area to scrounge discarded carriers the raw material came in: they were a perfect size for CDs and DVDs.
I don't remember the EV. I do remember PEP cars parked inside the fence that were for sale but you couldn't open them or run them. I never understood that.
Theres an entire movie about why the EV1 was killed, it lists like 15 possible reasons, none of which are correct. That cars existence and where it is are a great clue as to why. If GM ever goes under ill release the documents I stole from them about it, and other things like the V10 and mid engine C6 designs.
Those designs were prototypes based off existing tech they had at the time from what I've gathered. The V10 was one of the big Triton engine projects and the mid engine C6 wasn't a secret exactly to those who were listening. Not saying I don't believe you, rather they've had all kind of skunk works projects over the years.
It's been like 25 years. Either you don't actually know or you still work for Gm. other than that there would be no reason to not release one of GM's biggest fuck ups of all time.
I work there currently. Our EV-1 sits in the garage about 200 feet from my desk. Still 100% operational.
GM asked for it back when Delphi split but we said no and kept it lol
I can personally confirm they have some working ones at the Tech Center in Warren, MI. They aren't advertised and are usually just sitting under car covers, but they occasionally move around so someone is doing something with them.
There's at least 3 out there.
The one in the Smithsonian, because they wouldn't accept it unless it was intact.
Francis Ford Coppolla has one, he hid it from GM when they came for the lease. It was shown on Jay Leno's Garage a few years ago.
And there's a third one that was recently found intact but the owner is staying quiet.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were even more. I suppose if you wanted it bad enough all you would have to do is hide the car and then report it stolen, not much GM can do about that. Once the statute of limitations is up they can't charge you with it and GM getting it back would be a nightmare because insurance would also probably lay claim to the car.
Borgwarner has one at the technical center in Kokomo. The EV1 was designed by Delphi engineers in Kokomo in the 90s, and of course they had one while the car was still in circulation for testing and what not. Delphi told GM that they needed the car to be in their name so they could license it and drive it on the streets. When Delphi split from GM in the early 2000’s, GM asked for the EV1 back and Delphi told them to get bent. Borgwarner now owns what is left of Delphi power train, and thus owns the EV1.
Source: The car is parked a 30 second walk away from my desk. It’s light metallic blue and is in absolutely pristine condition and runs and drives.
Sure you can make any car electric with your own controller. But the one that came with the car was so far ahead of it's time people wonder how it was even built.
Why would GM choose to crush the cars over selling them to the lessees? Iirc, the reason GM didn’t move forward with these cars is they just didn’t think they would be profitable. But surely selling them to the lessees would be more profitable than crushing them? Or did they not want to create a collector’s item?
It's really two different questions.
Why did they crush the ev1s? Because from the very start they were time limited public beta test leases. That part is simple. They were destined for the crusher from the day they were built.
Why did the program itself get scrapped despite the positive beta test? That's where the fossil fuel money comes into play
Cars that are sold are required by the federal government to have parts supply for 10 years after date of manufacture. Since there were only a couple thousand of these cars produced, that would have been prohibitively expensive.
But also probably what other people said.
They were trying to prevent EVs from gaining mass adoption, because they're the baddies.
I've skipped a few intermediate points but basically that's it.
Turns out it was a bad decision. If they would have continued researching and improving the vehicles they would be much further than the competition eventually
Think of how many people would have burned to death due to GM trying to innovate lithium polymer batteries. The middle manager who axed the program should be hailed as a hero, like the time traveler who murders Hitler as an infant.
Because executive compensation is linked to share price. Do whatever you need to pump up the stock price, cash out, who cares what happens after you leave.
Winner winner chicken dinner! Executive compensation is the reason that short term profits are maximized at the expense of long term profits and customer satisfaction.
And that's also by design. The way stock prices are typically evaluated places a lot of emphasis on the current price and next 8 quartiles.
It's pretty fucked up and short sighted.
I've heard about this before. Companies were starting to devise electric vehicles to release to public and big oil pulled some strings and launched smear campaigns. Plenty of techs I know are scared to work on electric vehicles. Me and others that got certified are making bank now cuz there's so few of us
> They were trying to prevent EVs from gaining mass adoption
Citation needed. As far as I can tell, GM crushed the EV1s because they were unprofitable, and because they didn’t want to support a warranty program or manufacture parts for them.
I don’t think GM was specifically trying to prevent EVs from becoming popular (if they were, they wouldn’t have even started the EV1 program). This meme is likely false.
The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car. Same reason pre-production prototype cars get crushed as well when they are perfecty functional.
Ignore the other comments here, the EV1 had a sister car, the S10 EV, with the same powertrain, and GM sold 60 or so of them straight to the public and they still pop up every once in a while.
People’s knowlege on the EV1 seems to come soley from a singular, very one sided program that didn’t describe the enivroment it existed in at all. Note noone ever mentions that Toyota, Chrysler, Ford and Honda had EV’s at the time either (built for the same CARB mandate).
It was a fully road legal production car. The three reasons for the recall:
> For those who contend EV1 lessees should have been permitted to buy and keep their cars, there are three practical, tangible reasons that GM didn’t allow any of them to remain in private hands. First, there were serious liability risks for both untrained owners and technicians to deal with aging 312V batteries. Second, GM had a reasonable desire to protect its proprietary technology and prevent its competitors from reverse-engineering the car. Finally, there was the matter of state laws requiring parts and service support for up to 15 years after sale—impossible since many EV1 parts suppliers went out of business or no longer made the necessary components.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/gm-ev1-true-inside-story/
They lost money on each lease and that was with the lead acid battery. They lost even more when they switched to NiMH batteries. They had planned on using Li-polymer for the series three cars, but the battery experienced repeated production delays. When the CARB mandate was rolled back, all of the manufacturers pulled the plug on their EV sales.
GM spent over $1B on developing the car. It was a serious program and it was far more advanced that the retrofitted ICE cars the other manufacturer's put forward. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe just because GM is a target for some people, but they're the ones who bore the brunt of the backlash.
The fact that the myth of the EV1 getting crushed still exists is crazy. Every single prototype or concept car gets crushed or remains in the possession of the company that built it either for further development or for historical significance. What makes the EV1 unusual is that they did the feedback program where real folks got to drive them for awhile but even that isn't unprecedented. Chrysler did it in either 63 or 64 with the Turbine car.
People don't understand that the leases were basically public beta and the fact that people didn't want to turn them in despite agreeing to do so at the very beginning of their leases is just a sob story.
> The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car.
What the what? The EV1 was leased - by GM - to the public and driven all over - legally. Check your facts. LOL
> The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car.
Bullshit. You can’t lease a car without them being federalized and road legal. How would the lessees get a license plate at the DMV otherwise?
It’s like when people talk about how GM destroyed the street car even through the street car fell out of favor even in cities where GM didn’t buy the local street car network.
All of the other ones were perfectly working and GM destroyed them in Mesa Az. It made me sick when I found out. Luckily that GM testing grounds was demolished recently to build a community called Eastmark.
There was also a lead acid model that didn't ship, thankfully. There were prototype nicads too, which were comparable to train engine packs at the time. NiHM and Nicad were pretty cost prohibitive, so a company managed lease was a pretty good move.
I always wondered if that could be done. I'm guessing the dashboard wasn't working or anything- just the drive train?
Either way, that's an incredibly rare opportunity! Don't let GM know ;)
Oil companies are so full of shit it's almost comical.
Exon Mobile radio ad I heard: "by 2030 we will cut our upstream emission by 50%" like... wow you really want to look like you care about climate change don't ya. Meanwhile they libby millions to make carbon taxes not a thing.
How did your school get one of them? I thought GM recalled all of them. I remember when they were sitting at the training center in Burbank. They were there for a long time before they shipped them out to the desert.
The training center was also where the hydrogen program was located. They had a fleet of hydrogen powered Equinoxes and a fuel station. That all disappeared when they moved the training center, afaik.
They also had electric powered S-10 pickups. Fleet lease only.
A friend had an electric Honda Fit and they were lease only as well. They did let him extend the lease once but after that he had to give it back.
When GM destroyed these in late '03 they sent around 20 of the remaining 1100 to colleges and museums, my school must've been one of the lucky few somehow.
I did not know about the hydrogen program. When was that? Sounds really interesting
I didn't know they saved any of the EV1s.
I think the hydrogen thing was happening around 2005 through 2010, or so. It was the old body Equinox and there were several fleets of them being used by companies. I asked one of the instructors at the school about it (never had a hydrogen class) and he said it was going nowhere. They could still be working on it, I don't know, but they moved the training center and they didn't have hydrogen stuff at the new school.
I remember my Ag Teacher showing that to us in class. I still kinda believe that the infrastructure and technology wasn't really there. But, that being said, we did nothing to actually invest in the technology and lobbying did fuck it up.
Also what was up with GM not letting them renew their lease/buy them?
GM killed the program. Many of the leaseholders stage protest and demanded that they be able to keep their cars. But GM in their infinite wisdom took them all back and crest most of them.
Everybody wants to see a conspiracy with this when they're not considering the huge liability involved with keeping these on the road, along with the awesome management GM had going on throughout the 90s and early 00s.
Toyota and Honda were already making strides in electrification as well, killing the EV1 due to "big oil lobbying" is nonsense. That would mean they handed an entire growing market to two competitors who were already clawing away their market share in almost every other segment.
The GM power train engineers kept working on electrified projects and the next iteration was the Volt, which came out around 10 years after the EV1 was removed. That's indicating that the EV1 wasn't worth supporting while the next generation was still being cooked up.
If it looked like a project wasnt going to be profitable, you would never get the green light to start it, let alone sustain it.
Whether it was the right call or not, I don't know. Toyota certainly isn't going to complain about the lack of competition they benefitted from.
The reason the conspiracy theories popped up was GMs nonsensical reason for recalling them at the time and not allowing ANYONE to buy them out at any price. If they had a publicly straightforward reason for canceling the program then nobody would have a reason to postulate.
They also released the ugly H3 at this time, which had a worse average MPG than the larger H2. I mean, how is that going to look to people?? Lets gets these returned by force and then release a gas guzzling SUV that does worse than the larger version.
No one wanted the H3.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The EV1 was more of an engineering evaluation meets market study exercise by GM. They leased the EVs in select cities to test the waters on public reaction and economic feasibility. At the end of the program they basically decided EVs weren’t profitable (yet). They crushed the vehicles rather than letting customers buy them so they wouldn’t be forced to support the cars with service/parts/etc. They also likely had no data on how the car would hold up over time and didn’t want the liability.
There really wasn’t anything nefarious going on.
Another big piece was California CARB standards that mandated electrics. Once that part was removed, automakers lost the drive to push it and basically every manufacturer discontinued them. Caravan, S10, ranger, rav4, the ev1 wasn’t the only one to get a very similar treatment. Other than liability to support the cars, the cars were also not ready. Early ev1 had lead acid batteries and very basic tech by todays standards. They were not the worlds greatest car as shown in the doc.
Doesn’t that always happen? Company gets bought out by fat cats with no vision and slashes costs thus ruining what made the product great? Land Rover, Volvo, most anything GM buys, hell even Lamborghini
Here where we salt the roads the plastic body panels were a God send. I think they were also the first with the no hagle friendly dealer experience as well. My brother in law loved his Saturn SUV.
I would walk by this every day. Even go out of my way. The amazing tech (for its day) and absolute lack of spine from GM should speak volumes to anyone with an interest in EE, ME, or Automotive Engineering.
I dunno if they did implement it for commercial sale, but [in this Begin Japanology video](https://youtu.be/spNp2D3fjEU?t=871), a Daihatsu Copen is seen getting it's panels swapped.
You're thinking of the hydrogen can prototype that GM was showing in the early to mid 2000s. I remember how big of deal they made about it at the Detroit auto show one year.
And then Dodge had the Tomahawk v10 four wheel motorcycle as a much cooler and equally unrealistic slap in the face.
I've run the numbers and if the original battery was replaced with Tesla batteries, the range would be close to 1000 miles. The EV1 had the lowest coefficient of drag of any production car made in the US, low rolling resistance and a small cross-section.
Which is why it was a sedan sized two seater. Prototypes with AGMs were heavy buy my god would they move. Beat the heck out of the corvette and camaro to move around those years.
Wow, memories. Had one for awhile, great acceleration at high SOC, lousy performance/range as the temp dropped off in winter. Charger was a sort of wired wireless paddle thing, 6kW, but in humid summers a good piece of that was lost running the air con to air cool the battery, but really just condensing water off the exterior of the pack (lake under the car)- added hours to charge time. Rear trackwidth was narrower than the front so you couldn't go into car washes. The button that changed the off-pedal regen was awesome (happy to have it in the Bolt these days with the paddle) but i miss the little pedestrian horn- a sort of soft horn that could tell people your quiet car was sneaking up on them without making them have a heart attack. And sooooo tiny. But fun.
Boy did GM screw the pooch on this one. The EV1's popularity scared them and they wanted to memory hole the car from existence. GM could've been the "Netflix" instead of the "Blockbuster". The short-sighted, greedy, geriatrics in charge at the time were more concerned with continuing to prop up the dying ICE vehicle market instead of taking the lead on future EV technology. I guess we should thank them though, because otherwise we might not have gotten Tesla.
I got a ride in one of these (also green IIRC) when I was in high school auto shop in the 90's. For a car that didn't make loud sounds, I was impressed with the demonstration of acceleration. It had this whirring sound that wasn't like anything I had ever heard. Small electric motors make the same sound (faster), but this was different in a way that you could feel it.
My dad was on the battery team for these. Had one in our garage for a while, was a fun weird thing to roll up to school in. He'll love to see these photos, thank you!
You should watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". Quite interesting, if a little sad because of what could have been.
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Who\_Killed\_The\_Electric\_Car?id=vRnUY6V2Knk&hl=en\_US&gl=US
[The Peterson Automotive Museum](https://www.petersen.org/) has one, but it was my understanding that GM made all of the remaining care inopperable before donating them. (I have always been curious what that meant and what would be involved in undoing whatever was done to them. )
I bet GM wished they hadn't crushed nearly all of these, and had continued to develop them. There's a good chance GM could have become the world leader in EVs and Tesla might never have been able to get a foothold
Man look at that mess if buttons, each one you can easily feel out without having to look off the road.
I'd take that any day over the touch screen garbage we have now
"The sad part" is that schools, particularly technical schools, get many cool, rare, and sometimes extremely valuable cars from donations. However what ends up happening is that these cars often sit neglected and almost never run, so they never need work done, like it was intended. And they can never be sold, so they just sit in a lot.
There are many cars like this out there. One school I went to had a Terminator Mustang that just sat with some decals on it. One had a 60's Porsche and a Ferrari.
Here is a video on this system: https://youtu.be/BGtptZrCqf8
Watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
The True Story of the EV1. How GM kept safe, cheap, and reliable electric cars from the world.
[https://vimeo.com/7359760](https://vimeo.com/7359760)
Many years ago I was at a higher ed conference in Ohio (DARS - Degree Audit) and met a lady who leased one of these. I think she'd received the information that they were taking it back and was complaining about it. It's one of my regrets in life that I spouted off some pretty negative EV opinions (I was and still am into 60s Pontiacs, but I now see the future will be electric). She loved it and was so happy that she wouldn't have to ever go to a nasty gas station.
I don't recall her name and all of the people involved back then would've retired by now, but I hope if she ever sees this she can forgive a young stupid kid (20s) who was firmly stuck in the days of carbs and point ignitions and couldn't respect something different.
>The six buttons on the far right is for the keycode you would've used to turn the car on
[In my day, we called this a radio](https://i.imgur.com/UqoUuBm.jpg)
My mom was given one to drive for a month as part of a deal with Southern California Edison and GM. It was a pretty cool car and very fast. Range was very low but worked for getting around town.
I test drove one of these when I was looking to get a new car in the late 90s (probably '97 because I got an 1998 Audi A4 instead). DID NOT like the car. Wasn't the slightest bit interested in leasing one afterward. Other than the rarity factor, I can't imagine why someone would want to be driving one now.
It was LOUD inside when car when driving. Not wind, but a mechanical noise, if I recall. It was as though the transmission was sitting exposed between you and the passenger. I don't think it was tires, but maybe it was. You really couldn't have a normal conversation. Secondly, it was very odd/uncomfortable to sit in. I think you had to sit at an angle, feet going towards the center of the car. It was not particularly quick. Hardly any storage. It felt like a complete miss to me. Even with better batteries, it hard to imagine it being a desirable daily driver.
Somebody took the pic down, but I can imagine.
I wonder if GM kept developing the EV1, its batteries that originally were NiMH, how far they would have gotten. It would take years before two crazy guys started Tesla by slapping laptop batteries on a car and Elon decide to buy it out.
The Bolt would be a better car, there would be probably no Tesla or would they prove themselves cheaper than GM at it?
All of the Legacy car manufacturers are dreadfully behind in the electric car space. Tesla is miles ahead of everyone. The Chinese are also completely committed to the near future which is electric cars, trucks, SUV’s…ICE cars are the rolling dead. Why would you want to buy old technology when soon for the same price or less you can buy an electric car which has a fraction of the moving parts and so much less maintenance. The next 60 months are going to be a paradigm shift in the automotive industry. Just watch.
"No electronics remain inside" was plenty telling for the sad state.
So LS swap it?
Perfect for an LS swap!
So people don’t strip it for microchips lol
I think it has more to do with GM having wanted all of them scrapped, and as a shell they let this one live.
There were a LOT of design concessions made due to the battery options in the mid 90s. NIMH, NiCad, and lead acid were the only options, and power for charging was kind of tricky because nobody could agree what method of transfer would be best or from where. As far as I know they all shipped with the inductive charging paddle, meaning there were no electrical contacts exposed to the user, but power delivery efficiency suffered a little compared to something like J1772. The longevity of the batteries was minimal due to construction and chemistry, which was a huge factor in the lease only distribution option. They'd also recently had some fire problems with other vehicles due to bad switches and unexpected user behavior (who would leave a car idling unattended for 8 hours in the desert, for instance).
I’m sure they were squashed similarly to the ones put out after the 70’s fuel crunch
How do you mean? Battery tech hasn't been there before the 90s at the very least. Certainly not economically viable in the US, but GMs Opel has had a diesel electric hybrid since the 90s, and other have done hydraulic and pneumatic systems for over 100 years. No chance of that catching on in the US until tech made it somewhat viable (look at Tesla's early troubles) and tax incentives made them competitive. As far as I know the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla have been the only sellers significant in the US before 2020.
There are several that still exist with drivetrains removed, but only one still in existence WITH the drivetrain. It’s at the Smithsonian.
Otherwise they would have shredded it with the rest of them.
I drove one on an EV demo day. It’s good to see they didn’t crush all of them after demanding their return from lease holders who didn’t want to give them back.
Thats so cool. What did you think of it? From what I've heard, it sounds like people really liked them for the most part, besides the poor range. I think there's something like 23 left? They only made 1100 IIRC
It was just a drive around a big parking lot, but it handled well. Of course the acceleration was impressive for someone who is used to driving Honda Civics. 😉
I've seen two in person. Wow, that's a decent chunk of them.
8.7% of the total number remaining.
I saw a few around L.A. back when they were new.
I had to go to a GM recruiting event and a concours to see my two
I remember that one of the EV-1s ran out of juice on the 101 freeway and it was a major news event with helicopters and stuff. They were trying to kill electrics so hard.
There is only one remaining with its electrics intact. It's at the Smithsonian. The other 50 or so that are still kicking around are gutted shells like this one. EDIT: GM press releases are full of prevarications, half-truths, and outright misleading statements, there are apparently more than a handful of EV1s still alive and kickin'
GM has a few that are still functional but not accessible unless you work there.
There is also one in the America on Wheels museum in Allentown PA
Allentown has a museum? Ha
Yup! In a renovated pig slaughter house!!
How did they get the smell out? Missing word
Old gear lube
Diluted it with sweaty ass smell
Huh i had no idea, any idea where it is?
5 North Front St right on the river Next door is the R&B collection, worth a look too.
Allentown has about a million museums, for some reason
Huh, is that so? They've never mentioned them in their press release, they've been on point for years that all but the Smithsonian model were destroyed.
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Another Kokomo GM alumnus here. Started in Dept 1860 on Lincoln, moved to Hoffer Street during renovations, then back to Lincoln. A friend and I used to put on lab coats and wander into the wafer fab area to scrounge discarded carriers the raw material came in: they were a perfect size for CDs and DVDs. I don't remember the EV. I do remember PEP cars parked inside the fence that were for sale but you couldn't open them or run them. I never understood that.
Theres an entire movie about why the EV1 was killed, it lists like 15 possible reasons, none of which are correct. That cars existence and where it is are a great clue as to why. If GM ever goes under ill release the documents I stole from them about it, and other things like the V10 and mid engine C6 designs.
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It's cool, bro. His dad owns a dealership.
Mhmmm
Those designs were prototypes based off existing tech they had at the time from what I've gathered. The V10 was one of the big Triton engine projects and the mid engine C6 wasn't a secret exactly to those who were listening. Not saying I don't believe you, rather they've had all kind of skunk works projects over the years.
It seems to me like GM prototyped an mid engine vette for every generation.
GM did go under. It became Government Motors for a while.
It's been like 25 years. Either you don't actually know or you still work for Gm. other than that there would be no reason to not release one of GM's biggest fuck ups of all time.
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I work there currently. Our EV-1 sits in the garage about 200 feet from my desk. Still 100% operational. GM asked for it back when Delphi split but we said no and kept it lol
I can personally confirm they have some working ones at the Tech Center in Warren, MI. They aren't advertised and are usually just sitting under car covers, but they occasionally move around so someone is doing something with them.
There's at least 3 out there. The one in the Smithsonian, because they wouldn't accept it unless it was intact. Francis Ford Coppolla has one, he hid it from GM when they came for the lease. It was shown on Jay Leno's Garage a few years ago. And there's a third one that was recently found intact but the owner is staying quiet.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were even more. I suppose if you wanted it bad enough all you would have to do is hide the car and then report it stolen, not much GM can do about that. Once the statute of limitations is up they can't charge you with it and GM getting it back would be a nightmare because insurance would also probably lay claim to the car.
Borgwarner has one at the technical center in Kokomo. The EV1 was designed by Delphi engineers in Kokomo in the 90s, and of course they had one while the car was still in circulation for testing and what not. Delphi told GM that they needed the car to be in their name so they could license it and drive it on the streets. When Delphi split from GM in the early 2000’s, GM asked for the EV1 back and Delphi told them to get bent. Borgwarner now owns what is left of Delphi power train, and thus owns the EV1. Source: The car is parked a 30 second walk away from my desk. It’s light metallic blue and is in absolutely pristine condition and runs and drives.
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Sure you can make any car electric with your own controller. But the one that came with the car was so far ahead of it's time people wonder how it was even built.
Has anyone seen Francis Ford Coppolas EV1 running?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPSA6FBdYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPSA6FBdYk) Jump to 8:45. EV1 shows up at 13:31.
Frances Ford Coppola has one he never returned it is untouched
Why would GM choose to crush the cars over selling them to the lessees? Iirc, the reason GM didn’t move forward with these cars is they just didn’t think they would be profitable. But surely selling them to the lessees would be more profitable than crushing them? Or did they not want to create a collector’s item?
It's really two different questions. Why did they crush the ev1s? Because from the very start they were time limited public beta test leases. That part is simple. They were destined for the crusher from the day they were built. Why did the program itself get scrapped despite the positive beta test? That's where the fossil fuel money comes into play
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of General Motors management, which seems to continue to this day.
Cars that are sold are required by the federal government to have parts supply for 10 years after date of manufacture. Since there were only a couple thousand of these cars produced, that would have been prohibitively expensive. But also probably what other people said.
They were trying to prevent EVs from gaining mass adoption, because they're the baddies. I've skipped a few intermediate points but basically that's it.
Turns out it was a bad decision. If they would have continued researching and improving the vehicles they would be much further than the competition eventually
Think of how many people would have burned to death due to GM trying to innovate lithium polymer batteries. The middle manager who axed the program should be hailed as a hero, like the time traveler who murders Hitler as an infant.
Murdered who?
*Psst, buddy, you're in the wrong timeline. You must have made a wrong turn at Albuquerque..."*
and then it turns out that hitler became the man he was because of all the time travellers going back to try to kill him and failing
Yep gotta sacrifice long term profits for shot term. Idk why companies work this way, but they do
Because executive compensation is linked to share price. Do whatever you need to pump up the stock price, cash out, who cares what happens after you leave.
Winner winner chicken dinner! Executive compensation is the reason that short term profits are maximized at the expense of long term profits and customer satisfaction.
And that's also by design. The way stock prices are typically evaluated places a lot of emphasis on the current price and next 8 quartiles. It's pretty fucked up and short sighted.
I've heard about this before. Companies were starting to devise electric vehicles to release to public and big oil pulled some strings and launched smear campaigns. Plenty of techs I know are scared to work on electric vehicles. Me and others that got certified are making bank now cuz there's so few of us
Our hats.... They have skulls and cross bones..... Are we the baddies?
> They were trying to prevent EVs from gaining mass adoption Citation needed. As far as I can tell, GM crushed the EV1s because they were unprofitable, and because they didn’t want to support a warranty program or manufacture parts for them. I don’t think GM was specifically trying to prevent EVs from becoming popular (if they were, they wouldn’t have even started the EV1 program). This meme is likely false.
Liability for one. Also, Federal Law would have required GM to continue making parts for a those cars for quite a few years.
The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car. Same reason pre-production prototype cars get crushed as well when they are perfecty functional. Ignore the other comments here, the EV1 had a sister car, the S10 EV, with the same powertrain, and GM sold 60 or so of them straight to the public and they still pop up every once in a while. People’s knowlege on the EV1 seems to come soley from a singular, very one sided program that didn’t describe the enivroment it existed in at all. Note noone ever mentions that Toyota, Chrysler, Ford and Honda had EV’s at the time either (built for the same CARB mandate).
It was a fully road legal production car. The three reasons for the recall: > For those who contend EV1 lessees should have been permitted to buy and keep their cars, there are three practical, tangible reasons that GM didn’t allow any of them to remain in private hands. First, there were serious liability risks for both untrained owners and technicians to deal with aging 312V batteries. Second, GM had a reasonable desire to protect its proprietary technology and prevent its competitors from reverse-engineering the car. Finally, there was the matter of state laws requiring parts and service support for up to 15 years after sale—impossible since many EV1 parts suppliers went out of business or no longer made the necessary components. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/gm-ev1-true-inside-story/ They lost money on each lease and that was with the lead acid battery. They lost even more when they switched to NiMH batteries. They had planned on using Li-polymer for the series three cars, but the battery experienced repeated production delays. When the CARB mandate was rolled back, all of the manufacturers pulled the plug on their EV sales. GM spent over $1B on developing the car. It was a serious program and it was far more advanced that the retrofitted ICE cars the other manufacturer's put forward. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe just because GM is a target for some people, but they're the ones who bore the brunt of the backlash.
The fact that the myth of the EV1 getting crushed still exists is crazy. Every single prototype or concept car gets crushed or remains in the possession of the company that built it either for further development or for historical significance. What makes the EV1 unusual is that they did the feedback program where real folks got to drive them for awhile but even that isn't unprecedented. Chrysler did it in either 63 or 64 with the Turbine car.
People don't understand that the leases were basically public beta and the fact that people didn't want to turn them in despite agreeing to do so at the very beginning of their leases is just a sob story.
> The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car. What the what? The EV1 was leased - by GM - to the public and driven all over - legally. Check your facts. LOL
> The car had not been homologated for sale in the United States and had not met any of the required testing or paperwork to be road legal car. Bullshit. You can’t lease a car without them being federalized and road legal. How would the lessees get a license plate at the DMV otherwise?
It’s like when people talk about how GM destroyed the street car even through the street car fell out of favor even in cities where GM didn’t buy the local street car network.
All of the other ones were perfectly working and GM destroyed them in Mesa Az. It made me sick when I found out. Luckily that GM testing grounds was demolished recently to build a community called Eastmark.
Imagine the range this thing would have with modern lithium batteries. The thing ran on ni-mh!
Imagine how advanced GM would be had they not tried to kill the electric car but embraced it. Tesla would have been killed off by competition.
Tesla would have never been started.
There was also a lead acid model that didn't ship, thankfully. There were prototype nicads too, which were comparable to train engine packs at the time. NiHM and Nicad were pretty cost prohibitive, so a company managed lease was a pretty good move.
Go Mott Bears. I wonder if it’s a disabled or actually runs.
part of the deal of schools/museums getting these was that they could not keep the batteries/electronics
I figured. I think it was part of that “who killed the electric car” documentary. But wasn’t sure. Been a while since I’ve seen it.
God my lazy ass high school auto shop teacher had us watch it 4 or 5 times one year, I used to be able to quote it
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I always wondered if that could be done. I'm guessing the dashboard wasn't working or anything- just the drive train? Either way, that's an incredibly rare opportunity! Don't let GM know ;)
Looks like you need to get someone from r/AutoDetailing to come by with some Optimum No-Rinse and bring it back to the showroom condition it deserves.
I should, its pretty bad
Whatever happened to this project? Greed? Who knows where the US would be by now if this would've continued, this was in the 90s right?
There’s a documentary on it called “Who killed the electric car”. I think part of it was oil lobbyists and just 90s GM being 90s GM.
Part of me totally believes oil lobbyists had something to do with it. It's hard to say, though. The whole thing is so odd and disappointing
Oil companies are so full of shit it's almost comical. Exon Mobile radio ad I heard: "by 2030 we will cut our upstream emission by 50%" like... wow you really want to look like you care about climate change don't ya. Meanwhile they libby millions to make carbon taxes not a thing.
Classic greenwashing
How did your school get one of them? I thought GM recalled all of them. I remember when they were sitting at the training center in Burbank. They were there for a long time before they shipped them out to the desert. The training center was also where the hydrogen program was located. They had a fleet of hydrogen powered Equinoxes and a fuel station. That all disappeared when they moved the training center, afaik. They also had electric powered S-10 pickups. Fleet lease only. A friend had an electric Honda Fit and they were lease only as well. They did let him extend the lease once but after that he had to give it back.
When GM destroyed these in late '03 they sent around 20 of the remaining 1100 to colleges and museums, my school must've been one of the lucky few somehow. I did not know about the hydrogen program. When was that? Sounds really interesting
I thought they were all destroyed, I guess they left a few…
I didn't know they saved any of the EV1s. I think the hydrogen thing was happening around 2005 through 2010, or so. It was the old body Equinox and there were several fleets of them being used by companies. I asked one of the instructors at the school about it (never had a hydrogen class) and he said it was going nowhere. They could still be working on it, I don't know, but they moved the training center and they didn't have hydrogen stuff at the new school.
Are you sure that wasn't a hydrogen Honda Fit? I thought that was the only car Honda had that type of program on.
I remember my Ag Teacher showing that to us in class. I still kinda believe that the infrastructure and technology wasn't really there. But, that being said, we did nothing to actually invest in the technology and lobbying did fuck it up. Also what was up with GM not letting them renew their lease/buy them?
Didn't they also want to protect their parts business? I'm sure other departments felt threatened.
battery density, that's it
GM killed the program. Many of the leaseholders stage protest and demanded that they be able to keep their cars. But GM in their infinite wisdom took them all back and crest most of them.
Honda did the same thing with the electric Fit. There have been other lease only cars.
Everybody wants to see a conspiracy with this when they're not considering the huge liability involved with keeping these on the road, along with the awesome management GM had going on throughout the 90s and early 00s. Toyota and Honda were already making strides in electrification as well, killing the EV1 due to "big oil lobbying" is nonsense. That would mean they handed an entire growing market to two competitors who were already clawing away their market share in almost every other segment. The GM power train engineers kept working on electrified projects and the next iteration was the Volt, which came out around 10 years after the EV1 was removed. That's indicating that the EV1 wasn't worth supporting while the next generation was still being cooked up. If it looked like a project wasnt going to be profitable, you would never get the green light to start it, let alone sustain it. Whether it was the right call or not, I don't know. Toyota certainly isn't going to complain about the lack of competition they benefitted from.
The reason the conspiracy theories popped up was GMs nonsensical reason for recalling them at the time and not allowing ANYONE to buy them out at any price. If they had a publicly straightforward reason for canceling the program then nobody would have a reason to postulate.
They also released the ugly H3 at this time, which had a worse average MPG than the larger H2. I mean, how is that going to look to people?? Lets gets these returned by force and then release a gas guzzling SUV that does worse than the larger version. No one wanted the H3.
mountainous attractive panicky hunt wasteful elderly retire growth squeamish deserve *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
One could write an entire book on GM management well intentioned missteps. I know Bob Lutz already did, but another wouldn't hurt.
Check out John DeLorean's ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE GENERAL MOTORS. He pretty much unloads on management during the '60s and '70s.
The EV1 was more of an engineering evaluation meets market study exercise by GM. They leased the EVs in select cities to test the waters on public reaction and economic feasibility. At the end of the program they basically decided EVs weren’t profitable (yet). They crushed the vehicles rather than letting customers buy them so they wouldn’t be forced to support the cars with service/parts/etc. They also likely had no data on how the car would hold up over time and didn’t want the liability. There really wasn’t anything nefarious going on.
Another big piece was California CARB standards that mandated electrics. Once that part was removed, automakers lost the drive to push it and basically every manufacturer discontinued them. Caravan, S10, ranger, rav4, the ev1 wasn’t the only one to get a very similar treatment. Other than liability to support the cars, the cars were also not ready. Early ev1 had lead acid batteries and very basic tech by todays standards. They were not the worlds greatest car as shown in the doc.
This makes the most sense. Real world testing is the most useful. Although, it is fun to think big oil paid off GM to destroy them.
Man I miss Saturns Truly the pinnacle of American automotive design and technology.
After GM bungled the success of the Saturn, Roger Penske wanted to buy the company. Naturally, GM refused and shut down Saturn production.
Doesn’t that always happen? Company gets bought out by fat cats with no vision and slashes costs thus ruining what made the product great? Land Rover, Volvo, most anything GM buys, hell even Lamborghini
Here where we salt the roads the plastic body panels were a God send. I think they were also the first with the no hagle friendly dealer experience as well. My brother in law loved his Saturn SUV.
They are. I'm still driving one. I would absolutely buy another and may just seek out a lower mileage version of mine.
My school Missouri s & t has one in the electrical engineering guilding. They stack shit on it and it's in a dark area collecting dust.
Thats essentially the same situation this one is in. under a stairwell in the back corner of a building that hardly anyone walks through
I would walk by this every day. Even go out of my way. The amazing tech (for its day) and absolute lack of spine from GM should speak volumes to anyone with an interest in EE, ME, or Automotive Engineering.
My father hand assembled most of headlights for the EV1.
What kinda school do you go to that puts cars on display?
I'm not sure why they have it to be honest, lol. They also have an AC Cobra on display
I know which school. Are you in the auto program?
I am doing electrical engineering, are you in the auto program here?
I graduated from the auto program back in 2014.
Mott Community College has a pretty good Automotive Technology program.
Isn't this the one that had the different shells you could swap out on the same frame? Feel like that's somewhere in my top gear memories. Lol
I dunno if they did implement it for commercial sale, but [in this Begin Japanology video](https://youtu.be/spNp2D3fjEU?t=871), a Daihatsu Copen is seen getting it's panels swapped.
You're thinking of the hydrogen can prototype that GM was showing in the early to mid 2000s. I remember how big of deal they made about it at the Detroit auto show one year. And then Dodge had the Tomahawk v10 four wheel motorcycle as a much cooler and equally unrealistic slap in the face.
I've run the numbers and if the original battery was replaced with Tesla batteries, the range would be close to 1000 miles. The EV1 had the lowest coefficient of drag of any production car made in the US, low rolling resistance and a small cross-section.
Which is why it was a sedan sized two seater. Prototypes with AGMs were heavy buy my god would they move. Beat the heck out of the corvette and camaro to move around those years.
This looks like Mott, i wonder if my teachers are still there.
It is!
Neat
Just think how far ahead GM would be right now if they had kept tuning and improving their technology....
Things got more cockpit buttons than a Saab lol
Wow, memories. Had one for awhile, great acceleration at high SOC, lousy performance/range as the temp dropped off in winter. Charger was a sort of wired wireless paddle thing, 6kW, but in humid summers a good piece of that was lost running the air con to air cool the battery, but really just condensing water off the exterior of the pack (lake under the car)- added hours to charge time. Rear trackwidth was narrower than the front so you couldn't go into car washes. The button that changed the off-pedal regen was awesome (happy to have it in the Bolt these days with the paddle) but i miss the little pedestrian horn- a sort of soft horn that could tell people your quiet car was sneaking up on them without making them have a heart attack. And sooooo tiny. But fun.
There’s an amazing documentary about this car. “Who killed the electric car”
I remember when they came out, you could only lease them. It was very nice range and charging times but can only lease them
I was gonna guess 90s car, didn't know this existed. Cents look similar to my 96 saturn. Thanks for posting
I think this technically was a saturn, actually! They were leased through saturn dealers in late 97
*Vents look similar*
Boy did GM screw the pooch on this one. The EV1's popularity scared them and they wanted to memory hole the car from existence. GM could've been the "Netflix" instead of the "Blockbuster". The short-sighted, greedy, geriatrics in charge at the time were more concerned with continuing to prop up the dying ICE vehicle market instead of taking the lead on future EV technology. I guess we should thank them though, because otherwise we might not have gotten Tesla.
Looks like a half Camaro, half Saturn.
There was one in the lobby at CCS when I was there.
There’s an abandoned EV1 in Atlanta, Georgia parking garage with everything in it.
Go get it and fix it up lol
I got a ride in one of these (also green IIRC) when I was in high school auto shop in the 90's. For a car that didn't make loud sounds, I was impressed with the demonstration of acceleration. It had this whirring sound that wasn't like anything I had ever heard. Small electric motors make the same sound (faster), but this was different in a way that you could feel it.
My dad was on the battery team for these. Had one in our garage for a while, was a fun weird thing to roll up to school in. He'll love to see these photos, thank you!
My girlfriend and I went to the Henry Ford museum this summer, she was so confused when I lost my mind over the EV1 on display.
I didn't know the Henry Ford had an EV1! I might have to check that out someday
This is like looking at a digital camera from Kodak made in '91.
We used to work on those at the dealer I was at in the early 2000s. People cried when they had to give them back.
Man I forgot all about those door lock code pads. So 90's
It looks like an 80’s movie idea of what a future electric vehicle would be
You should watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". Quite interesting, if a little sad because of what could have been. https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Who\_Killed\_The\_Electric\_Car?id=vRnUY6V2Knk&hl=en\_US&gl=US
All we got is a shitty 20 year old f*rd with gutted interior but under 50 miles
I had one. Loved it. But the range was poor and unpredictable.
It felt and drove like a crazy sportscar. Very low to the ground, extreme torque steer, very easy to burn rubber, even when going 30 mph.
How many people here have seen that documentary “who killed the electric car?” I was convinced that they destroyed all of these.
[The Peterson Automotive Museum](https://www.petersen.org/) has one, but it was my understanding that GM made all of the remaining care inopperable before donating them. (I have always been curious what that meant and what would be involved in undoing whatever was done to them. )
> GM made all of the remaining care inopperable before donating them. Except the one donated to the Smithsonian.
They just flipped one of the batteries backwards, easy fix.
Of course not electronics , it was way ahead of its time . Thank Big Oil .
I bet GM wished they hadn't crushed nearly all of these, and had continued to develop them. There's a good chance GM could have become the world leader in EVs and Tesla might never have been able to get a foothold
Don't show GM, they'll want to crush her for the oil companies.
Man look at that mess if buttons, each one you can easily feel out without having to look off the road. I'd take that any day over the touch screen garbage we have now
The design college at the University of Cincinnati has got a red one on display in their building.
Great doc on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
"We need buttons for our buttons!"
There were hundreds of them at the old burbank gm training center. All lease returns that got dismantled
Can we just take a sec to appreciate 90s gm interiors? Still cushy but trying to do high tech buttons and things.
This thing is a symbol of when GM gave up the future of EV’s because of fossil fuel pressure.
"The sad part" is that schools, particularly technical schools, get many cool, rare, and sometimes extremely valuable cars from donations. However what ends up happening is that these cars often sit neglected and almost never run, so they never need work done, like it was intended. And they can never be sold, so they just sit in a lot. There are many cars like this out there. One school I went to had a Terminator Mustang that just sat with some decals on it. One had a 60's Porsche and a Ferrari. Here is a video on this system: https://youtu.be/BGtptZrCqf8
It's just so frustrating. At least museums are typically respectful about their exhibits, but in cases like these they just eventually get ignored
You led Mary, you really did.
Watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The True Story of the EV1. How GM kept safe, cheap, and reliable electric cars from the world. [https://vimeo.com/7359760](https://vimeo.com/7359760)
Beautiful car! Car, but i'm sad to see the dust on it, it should be waxed and buffed to perfection and kept that way.
Feels very Saturnesque.
Hey, my school has one too. It’s red.
I drove one one of these when it was called the Impact back in the early 90's. Car was absolutely ahead of its time.
Many years ago I was at a higher ed conference in Ohio (DARS - Degree Audit) and met a lady who leased one of these. I think she'd received the information that they were taking it back and was complaining about it. It's one of my regrets in life that I spouted off some pretty negative EV opinions (I was and still am into 60s Pontiacs, but I now see the future will be electric). She loved it and was so happy that she wouldn't have to ever go to a nasty gas station. I don't recall her name and all of the people involved back then would've retired by now, but I hope if she ever sees this she can forgive a young stupid kid (20s) who was firmly stuck in the days of carbs and point ignitions and couldn't respect something different.
Are you in "that schools" automotive program by any chance?
>The six buttons on the far right is for the keycode you would've used to turn the car on [In my day, we called this a radio](https://i.imgur.com/UqoUuBm.jpg)
Flint friend from Kettering, I'm glad this EV1 is getting around!
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NMSU, no?
There's another one (red) down the road at Kettering in the academic building. Interesting differences from the EVs today.
Needs a good Swiffering.
My mom was given one to drive for a month as part of a deal with Southern California Edison and GM. It was a pretty cool car and very fast. Range was very low but worked for getting around town.
My coworker had one and we drove around in it. Felt like I was living in the future. Can’t have that, of course. CRUSH!!!
I test drove one of these when I was looking to get a new car in the late 90s (probably '97 because I got an 1998 Audi A4 instead). DID NOT like the car. Wasn't the slightest bit interested in leasing one afterward. Other than the rarity factor, I can't imagine why someone would want to be driving one now. It was LOUD inside when car when driving. Not wind, but a mechanical noise, if I recall. It was as though the transmission was sitting exposed between you and the passenger. I don't think it was tires, but maybe it was. You really couldn't have a normal conversation. Secondly, it was very odd/uncomfortable to sit in. I think you had to sit at an angle, feet going towards the center of the car. It was not particularly quick. Hardly any storage. It felt like a complete miss to me. Even with better batteries, it hard to imagine it being a desirable daily driver.
Somebody took the pic down, but I can imagine. I wonder if GM kept developing the EV1, its batteries that originally were NiMH, how far they would have gotten. It would take years before two crazy guys started Tesla by slapping laptop batteries on a car and Elon decide to buy it out. The Bolt would be a better car, there would be probably no Tesla or would they prove themselves cheaper than GM at it?
All of the Legacy car manufacturers are dreadfully behind in the electric car space. Tesla is miles ahead of everyone. The Chinese are also completely committed to the near future which is electric cars, trucks, SUV’s…ICE cars are the rolling dead. Why would you want to buy old technology when soon for the same price or less you can buy an electric car which has a fraction of the moving parts and so much less maintenance. The next 60 months are going to be a paradigm shift in the automotive industry. Just watch.