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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.
What were they expecting? This is like walking into a country as well-gridded as ours and saying, ok, let's try this new type of electricity! But it needs completely new power plants to do it, and it is less convenient. People will look at you like you're crazy.
Electronic cars - even ones you have to plug in every few hundred miles - may have their day, someday. But not yet. Not while oil is so cheap. Cost of gas + Convenience of being about to fuel up anywhere at any time = Lower cost, for most people, all things considered (remember, price is but one factor) than driving an electric car.
I want to know why only 1000 were made. They spent a billion on a program and only sent it out to a wishlist? Or did they withhold it from the market because the infrastructure didn't exist?
When the time is right, both the cars and the infrastructure will change as needed. The time is not right.
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
Then you lose your bet.
that the power plants that make the electricity probably spew more pollutants into the air
/.) and you see that electricity is a good step between the way you turn a natural source of energy and the movement you want in your vehicle.
That is if your electricity power plant is using fossils fuels. Look a little bit further (or back, a couple of days ago on
bash$
(1) Power plants can be made more efficient and non-polluting, since they don't have the size/weight/cost constraints of a car.
(2) Properly designed electric cars store energy back into the battery when you apply the brakes. In theory, assuming no friction in the engine or with air, that would create zero-cost travel. In practice, there is friction, but that's all you're paying for.
Nuclear
As long as we're burning fossil fuels to generate power, all an electric car does is move the pollution somewhere else. Just think about it:
Gas car: Chemical energy -> kinetic energy
Electric car: Chemical energy -> kinetic -> electrical -> long distance transmission (power lines) -> chemical (batteries) -> electrical -> kinetic
In the end, you get sucky performance for a couple times the energy cost. The idea of an electric car is utterly absurd, and I can't understand why it happened at all.
Maybe after get serious about cheap, clean nuclear power, and we make some major breakthroughs in batteries, the electric car can happen.
... IMHO.
An electric engine for the city and one of the new, very efficient diesel engine otherwise. My Audi A2 TDI runs around 50 mpq (4,5 l/100 km), which is quite good.
Remember that electricity is not emission free unless it's solar power/wind or water. Emissions are just made somewhere else.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
With the US about to secure more Oil there's no need to replace the combustion engine.
I've had my butt reamed and my karma mugged for saying this before, but I've found a very effective way to solve my own personal transportation energy needs.
Being willing to haul my own ass around.
Talk about renewable energy. I just put a Macintosh Apple in the top hole (no not an Apple Macintosh), sooner or later it comes out the bottom hole, but in the meantime I get to move around.
Around the city center my ETA on a bicycle is about the same as a car. Between cities the bicycle ETA is about half a car's. Long hauls, well, the bicycle does drop to a third the average speed of a car.
I don't consider it a bad price to pay to make my fuel problem, "Hey, where's a good place for pizza around here?"
And to top it all off, it keeps my ass to a handy haulable size.
KFG
They blew up things like water desalination plants in the first Gulf War...maybe not directly at civillians, but the aftermath detrimented thousands. And the depleted uranium tiped missiles are still giving people cancer. Don't give me your brainwashed patriotic bullshit.
Anybody bother to check the dates on those letters?
This is all so like LAST YEAR!
Long hauls, well, the bicycle does drop to a third the average speed of a car.
You maybe able to maintain a constant speed of ~25mph for a 50 mile journey on a bicycle, but the problem is that the majority of the population actually can't. Some people just aren't genetically programmed to be fit, others don't do enough excercise. They also don't like the idea of getting soaked to the bone when it's raining, or blown off the road when it's windy, etc...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Yes, that would include the cost of the pollution generated by using fosil fuels.
Yes, that would include the cost of a war over oil.
Prices of $1000,-/liter anyone?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I knew you'd show up. Hi. :)
.*you have to work that many fewer hours to pay for it.*
Look, I'm not exactly unaware of the problems inherent in my choice. I live them every day, in upstate NY, year 'round.
I will make some points though. The reason I can do this and most can't is very simply because I do and they don't. I am not "genetically programmed" to be fit. In fact, if it were not for modern medical science I wouldn't even be alive. My own lungs are trying to kill me, and someday they will succeed. I am dwarf compared to the rest of my family and have a hard time digesting foods other people take for granted as standard fare. In fact, most of that standard fare will kill me. One of the side effects of this is arthritis in all my joints. I'm not Stephen Hawking, but I'm certainly not Mr. Olympia.
But an 11 year old girl who had never taken a long bicycle trip before pedaled with her family from California to NY. It really isn't that hard.
I can do what I do. And so could you, and 99.99% of the population *if they did.*
*Humans* are genetically programed for just this sort of energy output. Even the nearly dead ones without lungs, joints or digestive systems.
The downside is that they are clearly not as comfortable as an automobile. When it rains you get wet. When it's hot you sweat. When it snows you get cold. The wind is the cyclist's mortal enemy, not because it blows you off the road, it doesn't, because it slows you down.
If this stuff bothers you, don't do it. I'm not on a soap box saying you're evil if you drive.
However, I'm not going to say it's not a viable solution when I've found that it can be, and may be for you, even if you don't think so right now.
Fuel is cheap and pleasant to consume. Use makes you stronger instead of weaker. You spend nearly nothing on maintainence. You spend nothing on licenses, permits, insurance, etc. Having to worry about tickets is a virtually null issue, you never have to dig a bike out of a snow bank just to get started in the first place, and they're nifty, geeky little machines to boot.
And it may take you a bit longer to get where you're going, but. .
Am I an advocate? Yes, just as I'm an advocate for free software, and for the *same reasons.*
Am I a zealot? No. If you don't want to don't do it. But that's not the same as saying you *can't* do it. It's a choice.
KFG
By leasing, they could guarantee their ownership of the vehicles, and they could neatly recall all the product clean their house after the experiment.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Oil isn't going anywhere.
It will become increasingly difficult to find and extract, on a gradual basis. This difficulty will be reflected in the market price for oil, as it happens. It may be that, eventually, oil will be more precious than gold.
But I'll say it again: Oil isn't going anywhere. Even if it's as scarce as diamonds, it will still be available in some amount. The cycles which produce oil have not ceased: Believe it or not, even our own decomposing corpses will someday become a small puddle of crude.
It is not as if, 75 years from this moment, all oil will instantaneosly cease to exist. Instead, as the price of crude increases, our reliance on it will automatically decrease.
At some point, it will become more economically viable to drive an electric car which is plugged into a wind-powered grid than something which burns dinosaurs.
At the same point, there will plenty of oil left for manufacturing of the requisite wind machines, albeit at somewhat-elevated expense.
As the price continues to increase, other alternatives for crude will become apparent.
Another example:
We make consumer merchandise out of plastic because it's cheaper than other materials. And we make those plastics from crude because it's cheaper than other materials. When oil becomes so expensive that it's cheaper to make goods out of, say, hemp or soy, then that's what the market will direct companies and consumers to do.
An example in reverse:
Aluminum used to be amazingly valuable stuff, due to the difficulty in consolidating it. A big chunk of it tops the Washington Mounument, mostly for this reason. Nowadays, it's cheap enough to throw away after one finishes a can of Coke without thinking much of it, just as one currently burns through 20 gallons of gasoline without a second thought.
This isn't rocket science, nor does it take a PhD in microeconomics to understand and forecast these issues.
The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Kid-proof tablet..
The EV cars don't offer a lot of promise for replacing gas guzzling SUV's. The American consumer has spoken. The car companies need to chase down a way to make SUV's guzzle less gas.
The most immediate way to do that is borrowing concepts from the successful examples of hybrid cars that are out there today.
The next most immediate way to do that would logically be to use a hybrid turbo diesel / electric setup. But in the United States there is a strong stigma against diesel, even though they really are the stinky noisy black smoke belching garbage truck engines they were 25 years ago.
I used to own a 1959 Mercedes Benz 190D. That car sounded like a garbage truck, and woke all the neighbors up when it started. It was slow, and it smelled bad despite being in perfectly restored condition. That, my friends, is what most Americans think of when you say "diesel".
A friend of mine recently bought a brand new Volkwagen Jetta TDI and I must say diesel has come a long way, with a lot of props going to VW engineers. The TDI is quiet and smooth, odorless and relatively powerful. If I could get that in something made for taller men and larger families like a Crown Victoria I would be so happy.
The EV1 was a curiosity and a dead end. Range was short, charging options were very limited and there wasn't much promise for great improvements in the technology in the future. The car was relatively high maintenance (replace all the batteries every few years... wow that is expensive), and had to be parked somewhere with a specialized charging station because you can't fill up at the local Citgo. Also the range was impractical for most Americans who have a long commute to work and must make many side trips on the way home. It doesn't make sense for GM to continue dumping money into a dead end project. Let's see them move on aggressively to something more practical, please.
But diamonds are a plentiful commodity in the earth's crust.
It's an effective cartel -- DeBeers -- which creates the impression that diamonds are scarce, that you need to give one to your fiance to show your love, and that second-hand-diamonds and artificially produced diamonds are an insult instead of a "gem."
Good! I like the way you think man. I am thinking about doing the exact same thing because I live less then 8 miles from work. It would take me as much time to ride to work probably as waiting for the bus, riding the bus, waiting for the bus, and riding the bus and then walking from the bus stop to work. All of that waiting time, I could be moving. All of that walking time, I would be moving faster. So I figure it would take me at least as much time to get to work by riding a bike as it would riding the bus. As always, I could still ride the bus when the weather is bad and soon, my cities bus company will be putting bike racks on the front of the bus. I can put my bike on there, ride the long distance from point a to b, then bike the rest of the way with less transfers (only have to ride to closet bus down town, then ride the bus to down town, then ride from the main bus stop downtown to work.....probably a couple miles both to and from work).
:) The war in Iraq has never been about oil. France, Russia and others will still be able to get the oil currently in Iraq....in fact it may even be better priced under a new regime. The war with Iraq is because even after the Gulf War and Gulf War II, Iraq has still not disarmed. Plain and simple.
Also, it was not the parent that said this but others have said we only have 75 years of oil left.....BS! There is TONS of oil. There's alot of oil we just can't get to because it's not economical to get to. Current oil prices are also artificially high because the oil companies think that the war in Iraq might affect the oil supply. Watch this..after the war (this summer or 4 weeks....depends on the when we start the war), gas will drop to below a dollar a gallon (at least in the US). Gas is still, at current prices, cheaper then a gallon of bottled water. SO I am not complaining about the price much!
The EV1 was a failure because GM built it to fail. The fact that all EV1's "purchased" were leases (only thing allowed) and that they practically excluded 48 of the 50 states (I think it was only available in CA and AZ) did not help as well as their choice of using a heat pump for Heating and Air Conditioning. They did not even include a small bank of solar cells to help maintain charge during a sunny day trip! Also, the fact that the battery tech in the ev1 has now been superceded and the fact there was no real incentive for GM to sell the thing were just two more things on why the EV1 failed. With current electric motors, the best choice for a reduced emission car is a hybrid. It prolongs the use of Gas which makes all of the R&D that the automakers have done last longer and lets them make money while they can research making more efficient batterys and more efficient electronic and electrical parts. Eventually they can make a battery (or fuel cell) that will make operatining a electrical car econmical. I think that Fuel Cells will power electric cars eventually. Fuel Cells coudl even be made to run off of Gasoline, Diesel or Hydrogen. The first two could be used while the last one is developed. They could even include 2 tanks....one for gas and one for hydrogen in the same car. And I think since a electric motor and a fuel cell will take less space then a ICE engine, it would not even be a space issue to include a duel tank. The future will have different cars. Back in the 50's, they thought we'd all have air cars and be flying from point a to b. Boy were things wrong there!
Gorkman
I drive a VW Jetta TDi car, that is, a Diesel car. I can get 50mpg on highway driving at normal speed.
:)
When speeding (I've done 115mph and there was some more left) and doing mostly city traffic I go down to only 44 mpg.
In Germany they have the VW Lupo, a car that gets ~80mpg. And also the bigger sedan VW Passat TDi, with ~45 mpg IIRC.
Now, those cars need zero modifications to use BioDiesel fuel. BioDiesel is vegetal oil. Nothing else could be more ecology-friendly. And, if needed, you can mixe it with regular petro-diesel, for older engines.
Now, Diesel fuel used here in the US are waaaay too dirty (this is what kills Diesel cars in the US when you look at EPA statistics). There are some laws in place to reduce pollutants in US Diesel to European/Japan levels (1/100th of current sulphur contents).
Also, my car drives like a sports car: very nice handling (corners, break...), it has side aribags and all kind of safety features... and I have to really try to drive it under 85 mph, 'cause it wants to go fast.
Then, the Wagon version has about the same cargo room as a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Good for soccer moms...or for carrying those plasma TVs and huge monitors for our computers
I say that current technology (Diesel/BioDiesel) is good to reduce pollutants and fuel consumption. In Europe, Diesel represent more than 50% of total new car sells.
The US has lots of land. The tobacco industry s looking for a replacement... Maybe all can go to soy for BioDiesel (or similar crops). This way we decrease our dependency of foreing oil, decrease pollutants in the air, provide a good income to our farmers (the new "bio-oil industry") and Detroit has a new field to innovate and generate new jobs. And Diesel engines last 200,000 - 400,000 miles. Not bad.
What do you all think?
....I never got a chance to drive an EV1, but they were small like the Insight. Whether youre trying to save some money or put your effort into the environment, the Hybrids are a good deal. If you buy a new untitled Hybrid, you're elligible for tax incentives as well. I bought my Insight (70MPG) used and love it for around town and what traveling I do on highway. It beats the 15MPG my SUV gets which I'll have to hold onto for towing and snow.
http://www.insightcentral.net
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
Do you have supporting evidence that the parent poster is wrong? Or, are you simply a troll?
:-)
The articles I've read about emmisions in new cars demonstrate that particulate and NOx releases from power plants that have been grandfathered out of the Clean Air Act of 1968+ (and don't get me started on THAT) are still operating burning high sulfur coal without smokestack scrubbers.
Regarless, that begs the question. Is electric the future? Well, not now with Ford and GM (Toyota) bowing out. We've known the failure of the GM program for a while now. Not news.
The issue seems to be a chicken and egg thing though. How do you get an effective infrastructure of chargers distributed without the cars? Why would you build cars without an infrastructure?
A good example of this was the fad of propane-fueled autos in the 70's and 80's. MPG sucked but you didn't pay road use and it was less than half the cost of gasoline even after calculating the caloric differences.
But, you can't find fuel on a cross-country trip. So, you're stuck. A friend that converted his 81 ElCamino (in '81; a tough feat to "fool" the computer back then!) ended up with keeping his regular gas tank and switched between propane bottles in the bed of the vehicle (never call it a "truck" to his face). A Hybrid of sorts
So, are hybrids a good idea? Yep, until infrastructure issues are solved.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
There's no such thing as not being "Genetically programmed to be fit". Natural selection has programmed us to be physically fit and active. We are, in many respects, programmed to be the elite long distance athletes of the animal kingdom. Our naked skin, endowed with sweat glands to dump excess heat from prolonged exercise, is unique in the animal world, and a hint for exactly what our latent capabilities are.
What is true is that for any single activity, such as cycling, or power lifting, most of us are not capable of becoming elite. Natural ability is distributed on the bell curve; in absolute terms the difference in capacity between elite and ordinary is not that big. An average person could train to reach sustained speeds of 25 mph over flat terrain. An elite athlete is perhaps on the order of 25% faster.
Eddy Merckx did 49.431 km in one hour (or 30.72 mph) on a conventional racing bike; that's since been bested several times. The current record is 56.375 km/hr (about 35 mph). These are elite athletes on closed tracks at high altitude to reduce aerodynamic drag. They are also exerting themselves to the maximum.
A good estimate of the comfortable sustained speed of an ordinary commuting rider would be 15-20 mph. I doubt that more than ten or fifteen percent of the population could sustain the upper end of that range if you just dragged them in off the street; however 100% of the healthy population could train to that speed in a few months.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In reality, if you want more energy, you stick a hole is Saudi Arabia, who spends $2/barrel to extract it, put it on a boat to the US, and stick it in a plant.
While some of our energy comes from other sources (coal, nuclear, hydropower, etc.), the variable sources of energy are oil based. The reason we can't get alternative energy is because oil is SO cheap and plentiful. Sure, the current "cheap oil" will run out in 20 years (it will ALWAYS run out in 20 years, that's how you extract oil), the newer technology expands the amount of oil that we can get cheaply.
Now, oil power plants can/should be more efficient ways to get energy from oil than cars are... however the amount of increase is the problem. Are power plants 20% more efficient? 50% more efficient? 100% more efficient? What about getting the power from point A to point B?
Your point about upgrading missing something. Power plants are operated for a LONG time. Taking one down for an upgrade is expensive and reduces power output... you can't do it unless there is a lot of spare electricity. And given the desire to not build extra plants, there isn't a lot of spare. As a result, plants are upgraded less frequently that you'd desire.
Cars on the other hand, are in service for between 10 and 20 years (sure exceptions on each side, but I'd say that the average car is probably in use for 10-12 years). This is a guess, maybe I'm over/underestimating how long cars are used. However, that process of replacing cars frequently means that they ARE upgraded regularly. Once you have a new way of converting gasoline to energy (say, reducing gas use by 20%), within 3 years, a LOT of cars have that in place, and within 5 years, at least half of the cars on the road have it.
Compare that to power plants, where you need a massive change to take them down, and new ones aren't that common.
Will a power plant shut down for 6 months for a 5% increase in efficiency? Will all new GM owners get the new generation capacity if it happens to be in the hood of their car when they buy it?
Alex
I like the bit about spending a billion dollars. What they aren't telling you is most of the money came for the US Gov't. So we payed for GM to take a half assed approach to energy efficiant cars.
What's ironic is it's so short sighted. Every year the Toyota and Honda get that much further ahead. When I go car shopping I look for cars made in Japan. They are made better, and more fuel effient, and usually cheaper.
There is/was a legitimate technical reason for the inductive charger. Charging the car *quickly*, as in an hour or two instead of overnight, requires tremendous current. I don't remember the amount, but it's many times more than the 15A or so that a normal consumer power cord can deliver. Such large amounts of current require special equipment, which is expensive, and still dangerous for a non-electrician to be dealing with. Since it would cost just as much as an inductive system anyway, without even considering the safety/liability issues, it makes sense to just use the inductive system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending GM. They were definately trying to make sure they got a piece of every bit of electric car action via their inductive charging patents and such. And there's nothing wrong with a normal household power cord if you have all night to charge the car. But for those quick charge stations in public parking lots, inductive charging was really the only way to go.
Straw man. I'm an evironmentalist, and just about all of my friends are. None of us have ever complained, nor heard anyone complain, about poor little birdies getting chopped up by wind turbines. I've heard a lot of anti-environmentalists (do you really fathom the meaning of that stance?) use the little birdies thing as an example of how out to lunch the environmentalists are.
It's a BS argument, essentially.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Great joke, but my theory remains that the EV1 may yet (positively) define the future of GM and that pulling the plug like this has always been part of their plan - and not because of some oil and automotive industry co-conspiracy to keep electric vehicles of the market forever.
You'll notice that the EV1 and other first generation automotive technologies like the first hybrids are almost always small, ugly, and generally impractical (but very expensive) vehicles with very little appeal to the masses. These vehicles are purposely marketed to appeal ONLY to the early adoptors (usually geeks and hobbyist types with relatively large disposable incomes).
These clunky vehicles are simply beta versions and their drivers are simply beta testers that are being used to work out the bugs prior to the first release. The automakers never expect to make a cent off these individual cars and programs, but set the prices sufficiently high (and limit the features) to scare off the average joe and to recoup a (minor) percentage of their R&D costs.
Limiting the availability of these beta units to a small group of enthusiasts allows automakers to understand the technical and (perhaps more importantly) the behavioral issues associated with the various innovations WITHOUT turning off the mass market due to the known and expected bugs and limitations. Removing these products from the market is the same as removing support for a beta program once the real deal has been released. Cost and liability may be factors, but the real issue is removing the association of electric/hybrid/fuel-cell vehicle with some sort of early generation and experimental toy.
Many of the lessons learned from the introduction and road-testing of the EV1 have led and will continue to lead into the eventual (hopefully) mass marketing of more promising technologies such as hybrid vehicles and fuel cells. While it is a total shame that GM is treating their EV1 innovators the way they are, this probably has much more to do with very poor PR and Legal advice than a reflection of their commitment to alternative energy.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
And Japanese companies and their fuel cell cars are the future.