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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.
When the EV1 came out, the chairman of GM said it would "define the GM of the future"
So what he's saying is the future of GM is to pull out of the market
Jason
ProfQuotes
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
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$
Wrong wrong and, uh wrong. You forget that a sizable portion of the electricity that ends up at your outlet comes from clean renewable resources, such as hydro electric and wind and solar power. Also, producing power centrally is more efficent than widely distributed power production, as pollution controls can be supervised much easier. The electric car is fantastic because it allow this flexibility in power sources -- you can charge your electric car with whatever you want. Install a fuel cell at home, bam, your car is charged. Install a generator, bam, it's charged. You get the idea.
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.
To explain the charger problem, CARB mandated a conductive charger, or one that uses a direct electrical connection to the charging system. Many vehicles, including the EV1, currently use the Inductive charging system, which utilizes no electrical contact (for safety reasons) between the charger and the vehicle, but rather a inductive magnetic coupling. There is no cheap way to convert between the two systems, hence the discontinuing of the EV1.
It is called a PC. I drive to work everyday with it.
If you and your boss trust you enough to let you stay home x/5 days a week, then you cut your commuting polluting by x * 20%.
I also get to sleep with the woman in my home office - my wife.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
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.
I think it makes sense, It would be nice for the world to switch over to electric cars in a year, but in reality, it's not going to work that way.
What will probably happen is that for the next several years, we will start to switch over to hybrid cars, and ease into the electric car idea, and as the prices of gasoline continue to rise, we'll start to switch to completely electric cars. I think it will be at least ten to fifteen years though, before such a thing happens. It's such a massive change to our economy, infrastructure, etc, that we can't really switch overnight like some manufacturers seem to think. This is probably a smart move on GM's part.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Before everyone gets on my case about it, I spent 2 years on a team that built hybrid cars. Electric powerplants, by themselves, are ecological nightmares. The majority of our wall-socket power is via coal or other equally ecoterrorizing sources. Their battery packs are highly poisonous, and gigantic on normal electric vehicles. GM's even spending a good portion of its money on hydrogen powered cars, which don't create any CO2.
Even though there are some concerns about the source of hydrogen, you can 'cook' oil and extract it from there, without combustion.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
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.
I've heard a lot in this thread about how electric is a good, clean, cheap energy source etc.etc.etc. Then I read a post which said how the electricity is produced by coal, gas, etc.-burning stations. Perfectly correct. That's where the majority of all our energy on Earth comes from. Then someone flamed them for not thinking about renewable, e.g. solar, wind, wave.
The CHEMICAL and ENGINEERING power costs of making the plastics and metals, the chemicals in batteries, damn, even the wires means that we would use up most of what remains of our (i.e. the world's) oil supplies just building enough "renewable energy" equipment to keep us going for a few years.
We've got, maybe, far less than 75 years of oil left. That means we have about 50 years to become totally dependent on renewable sources, enough for us to use them to produce everything we know and use today.
I have a close friend, who's got more degrees, PhD's and Doctorates than I've had hot dinners and he was the first to show me the figures and open my eyes to this. How do you build and maintain a wind farm of giant metal and plastic structures without oil, coal and gas to power the factories and foundries? It's EXTREMELY difficult.
This is why the scientists are worrying. It's no longer just a matter of "Hey, let's just switch to solar." The manufacturing and maintenance power-cost of anything new is phenomenally expensive if we've got no fossil fuel left to make the damn things and keep them running.
... 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
As far as I understand it, the profit is in the efficiency. A power plant is, due to its large scale, much more efficient in converting chemical energy to electrical energy than a single car engine is. From the power plant on, you've pretty low loss due to resistance etc.
Moreover, it's easier and cheaper to de-polute the gasses coming from a big power plant, also due to scale, than to de-polute the gasses coming from a single car. Also, a big advantage is you get to decide where the polution is released; aka not in the city.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
(1) Power plants are more efficient than your car engine (typically twice as efficient).
(2) Oil is not universally cheap. I pay 4-5x more for petrol than you do. I think Europe has a similar high price for oil.
(3) Dense cities cannot cope with pollution from fuel-burning cars. A perfect example is your own LA. Moving the pollution away is good for the city even if it doesn't greatly help the planet.
(4) Power plants don't have to burn oil or gas or coal. There are plenty of alternatives (though none of them quite as cheap as oil or gas or coal, yet). Hot rock and solar are my personal bets for the future of electricity production; both have potential to be cheaper than fuel-burning plants.
(5) It takes decades to develop technology from concept to production line. It's important that research into EV continues so that the technology is fully developed when (if) the cheap sources of electricity finally appear. This may seem "absurd" to you but many people thought the Altair was absurd too. Look where it got Bill Gates. Being on the bleeding edge can often pay off in the long run. Companies with deep pockets (ie, GM) are willing to sink billions into "absurd" concepts because every now and then one of those crazy ideas will pay off big.
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
Wow, these guys must be pretty dumb then. If an electric motor is good at anything, it is acceleration. An electric motor has its highest torque at zero rpm. Do a Google search for electric dragsters and you'll find some neat stuff, e.g. like this.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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?
Hehe, you may get tired of gross inaccuracies being spouted wildly by idiot americans about Canada, but I get just as tired of people using CanAda of an example of how the US should be run when it has a population that is slightly more than 1 tenth the population of the US. Each country is unique. Each country has issues it must work on. You can't assume that what works in one will work in the other.
:P
The latest data I could find on Canda's population is from the 1996 Canadian Census listing which states that there are 28,846,761 people living in the country. I belive current estimates put Canada at 31 million and the US at 270 million. My remark about population size and distribution and implementing "programs" (whether it be power distribution or internet) still holds. Most of the population is clustered around major cities (as with most countries, the US included) and the smaller sized population allows large public works to be slightly more effective at reaching the majority of the population. That's an oversimplification of course as there are political and social factors as well, but the population size and distribution does play a major role.
NYC consumes a lot more power than you might think, but yeah, I was making a gross exaggeration and being abnoxiously sarcastic. My apologies both for not making that clear and for any percieved insult.
In the interest of clearing the air here are the actual stats for the relevant areas. I can't find the numbers for the city itself, but New York State consumes approximately 4.28 trillion BTUs (1.26 billion kWh unless I totally screwed the conversion up) of power a year (according to 1999 DOE data) and Canda consumes 551 billion kWh per year (according to 1998 data). The US as a whole consumes 3.36 trillion kWh. So yeah, slight exaggeration.
Then again so was your estimation of the size of Toronto.
According to the City of Toronto's facts guide, the city has a population of 2.48 million people. What it is has that is big is government. The same site boasts that Tornoto has, "5th largest municipal government in North America."
Here is the top 10 (including Mexico) in North America:
Pouplation (in millions)
1.) New York USA 20.2
2.) Mexico City Mexico 19.8
3.) Los Angeles USA 16.2
4.) Chicago USA 8.9
5.) Washington D.C. USA 7.5
6.) San Francisco USA 6.9
7.) Philidelphia USA 6.1
8.) Boston USA 5.7
9.) Detroit USA 5.4
10.)Dallas USA 5.1
And for the sake of completeness the world:
1.) Tokyo, Japan 28
2.) New York City, United States 20.1
3.) Mexico City, Mexico 19.8
4.) Bombay, India 18
5.) Sao Paulo, Brazil 17.7
6.) Los Angeles, United States 16.2
7.) Shanghai, China 14.2
8.) Lagos, Nigeria 13.5
9.) Calcutta, India 12.9
10.) Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.5
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
My husband and I leased an EV1 for three years. It was the best car we've ever driven: quiet, amazing acceleration, and zero emissions. (There isn't even a tailpipe.) We (and other drivers) sent money to GM asking them to extend the lease without a warranty, rather than crush the cars, and they said no. GM's claims that electric cars failed in the marketplace are false. EV1 drivers wanted to keep them, and there were many waitlisted would-be drivers who never got a car, despite GM's lack of advertising, etc. For much more information, see http://cleanup-gm.org.
Our primary car now is a Toyota Prius, which we've been happy with (except by comparison to the EV1). Driving around San Francisco and commuting over the Bay Bridge, often in bad traffic, I average 46 MPG, and it has lower emissions than other cars with internal combustion engines. It cost a little more ($22K) than an ordinary car, but I expect to recoup some of that with the tax deduction and lower fuel costs.
We recently assumed the lease on a Ford Th!nk City. As its maximum speed is about 55 MPH and range about 40 miles, neither my husband nor I can drive it to work. Instead, my husband drives it to the Caltrain station. We also drive it around town, where it can fit in tiny parking spots.
My points are:
- The EV1 was a great car. It was not pulled because of any deficiency or lack of demand.
- The only electric car available for lease for a little longer (Th!nk) is vastly inferior to the EV1 but still meets some people's needs.
- I was fortunate enough to get to lease electric cars because I was in the right place at the time. Many other people tried without success.
- While hybrids are better than ordinary cars, purely-electric cars have been designed and produced in ridiculously small quantities, not meeting consumer demand.
- If the government hadn't loosened its regulations, more people would be driving electric cars now or in the near future, and we'd be using less oil and polluting less. (Lest you dismiss all regulation as bad, consider the government's role in seatbelts, catalytic converters, and airbags.)
(And, yes, I know electricity needs to be produced somewhere. Internal-combustion engines are one of the dirtiest and least efficient methods, and spew most where populations are dense.)