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GM Pulls Plug on Electric Car
davebo writes "General Motors' EV1, the all-electric dynamo of a car, has been pulled from the market. You can read the letter GM sent out to current EV1 drivers here. When the EV1 came out, the chairman of GM said it would
"define the GM of the future". Guess he'd like to take that back now . . ." With Ford also cancelling their electric vehicle program, looks like hybrids are it for the next few years.
A sizeable portion from renewable energy?
If you're in the US, that's about 6%.
The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.
If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.
Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.
And asssuming an electrical system which is twice as good as the theoretical best case.
My university engineering department were doing some work on a hybrid car.
It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.
The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.
After looking at the article a bit, it's very interesting to note that the main reason the car was being discontinued was not sales nor popularity issues, but rather CHARGING issues! Apparently CARB (California's nazi regime of pollution control) mandated a new charger system that basically requires a redesign of the EV1 in order to be compatible. Hopefully with these new standards now set, we'll see electric cars back on the market soo.
Some points:
#1. The EV-1 program has been dead for several years. To my knowledge, no new units have been leased (they lease, never sell) to consumers, and they've been steadily retiring their entire EV-1 fleet as they come off lease (scrapping them, as it were.) At the present time, the only major auto manufacturer to EVER sell EVs to the general public is Toyota (the RAV4EV, at over $40k, only in California.)
#2. The inductive MagnaCharger design was very expensive, proprietary, inefficient, and was forced upon the EV industry by GM at the time (about 5-6 years ago) as a defacto method of charging. Unfortunately, GM was really the only one who used it - there were several variants, including a mini-magnacharger used by Honda (or was it Ford?), but all this did was require that the free public charging spaces had to accomodate two different charging standards, so two spaces that could have two cars with two chargers could only support one of each type.
Even worse, inductive charging as a standard was viewed as an attempt at using regulations to destroy the hobbyist EV market, which used standard 3-pronged conductive chargers (plug into your wall type). By cornering and enforcing their standard, GM attempted to make their EV model the only legal one. Yes, it was possible for hobbyists to purchase magnacharger equipment (in fact, there were converters you could buy that would convert a magnacharger paddle into a 3-prong conductive for your conventional charger), all it did was add cost.
Although GM had practical saftey reasons for advocating inductive charging, the fact that they had patents on everything relating to the magnacharger design probably factored into the decision.
So, in conclusion, GM will probably NOT bring back the EV-1, except as a demonstration unit. They're scrapping every EV-1 they can get their hands on, probably to claim the depreciation for their taxes. Note, that there's nothing to prevent an EV-1 driver from carrying around an adapter unit to convert from a CARB-conductive to a Magnacharger (as leasees of the EV-1 had in their garages, in a bigger form), but I doubt that GM will ever produce one now...
Hey everyone who is debating about "demand for cars" and cost of this or that, did you read GMs explanation to EV1 drivers? They said that CARB has decided that any car that doesn't use a conductive charging (rather than inductive) won't qualify as zero emissions. Since Toyota and GM both use inductive charging, they'll be dropping the cars. They are basically really upset that California decided to screw them like this so that they'd have to complete redesign the chargers on the cars and refueling stations, (very very expensive) so GM is saying "screw you too."
I don't personally understand it. Does anyone know why inductive charging shouldn't qualify for zero emmissions?
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe