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.

Comments

Did they expect different?

[aleonard]

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.

My electric car has no wheels

[GeorgeTheNorge]

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.

Re:electric

[Amroarer]

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.

It makes sense

[revmoo]

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.

Re:Perfect Car

[Amroarer]

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.

"Renewable" sources

[ledow]

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.

Re:"Renewable" sources

[kfg]

I knew you'd show up. Hi. :)

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. . .*you have to work that many fewer hours to pay for it.*

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

Re:"Renewable" sources

[adolf]

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.

Re:One word:

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

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.

Re:electric

[silentbozo]

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...

read GMs explanation - it's because of regulations

[sabaco]

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?

BioDiesel

[opkool]

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?