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Smithsonian Removes EV1 Exhibit
johnMG writes to mention a Seattle PI article on the Smithsonian's move to remove the EV1 electric sedan from display. From the article: "The upcoming film 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th. GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display."
Lots of things that people like are canned all the time because no-one buys them
But GM didn't just "cancel" the EV1 like these other things. GM went to auctions and bought back the cars, and then crushed and recycled them. People offered to buy back the cars from GM as "junk cars" (waiving liability), but GM refused. Basically, GM has spent and passed up a bunch of money to make sure these cars were destroyed.
You can read more weird things about the program in the Wikipedia article. There's far more to this than "company stops selling product."
Alternative fuels have always been repressed by the US government and big auto makers because of the global dependence on oil. Do you think it has taken us 50 years to get a car to go supposedly 40mpg?
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Back in the late 70's there was a little know company called AMECTRAN, that a the first production ready electronic vehicle that could go 80mph, had a range of 100+ miles, and costs less than $10,000. Electric cars suck? Yea right! Take a look at the inventor's website: http://www.amectran.com/
Here are two articles from Nature and Science journal...
No, they are just links, but not to articles
Apparently this is a non-news outside of a scientific community, for some reason...
It is non-news because most people outside the scientific community aren't going to pay to read these articles. And no one who has read it has thought it newsworthy enough to discuss on a mainstream, nonscientific or free website.
And what's with all the ellipseses, I didn't insert those. Why must all your sentences end with 3 periods?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
. . . was very, very simple. GM couldn't make any money from them. They knew that going into the project, they knew it when they were making prototypes under the "Impact" name, etc., etc. Thirty thousand dollar loss per vehicle.
So why did they make them at all?
Well, California was going to impose a zero-emissions vehicle standard, that required a fixed percentage of the vehicles sold in California from every manufacturer be zero emissions. GM figured it could own the Californian market if it could put together a from-the-ground-up electric car, while companies like Chrysler were doing things jurry-rigging electric Voyager minivans. After all, if GM were able to dominate the electric car market, then the percentage-of-sales rule would allow it to dominate the normal auto market in California. Who cares if you're losing thirty thousand dollars per vehicle on a couple of percent of the Californian auto market, if you simultaneously wind up with much higher, law-guarnateed market share on profitable cars?
So, after GM puts in all this investment, California repeals the law just as it's going to go into effect, leaving GM with no way to actually make a profit from the vehicles. They go ahead with the program anyway (it's too late to save much money, since the tooling was already ordered on year-plus lead times), they recoup some cash leasing the cars), and then when the liability calculations make it cheaper to recycle and scrap than continue to lease or sell them, they got rid of them.
Five gets you ten that the movie comes up with some wild-ass conspiracy theory involving oil company influence at GM, though. After all, when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace, it has to be the fault of Big Evil Corporations.
While it's true that a battery-only car is still fossil fuel powered in the end, a gas burning electric plant is FAR more efficient than a 3 liter V6, thanks to economies of scale, and all that jazz. An automotive engine is optimized primarily for fast acceleration and small size, whereas a gas generator in a plant is optimized for maximal power generation per gallon -- size and acceleration are totally useless.
So, it's not actually clear without hard numbers wether or not driving an electric car 500 miles requires more fossil fuels than driving a gasoline car 500 miles.
You can. http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/wac5/smithtour.htm
rj
Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly. I have never heard of a perfectly efficient method of transmitting electricty from where it was produced to where it was needed (e.g. charge up the car). Ergo, there would be a net increase in "environmental badness" to use the e-car vs what we have now.
In the real world, it doesn't always work this way. For one thing, burning fossil fuels in a powerplant is much more efficient than in a small engine. For another, about 20% of the electric power in the US comes from nuclear, hydroelectric, and other non-CO2-emitting sources. Even with transmission loss, storage battery loss, and conversion loss, electric vehicles can put a lot less carbon in the atmosphere than a gas vehicle. Do a comparison between a 2001 Toyota RAV4 EV and the comparable gas model, and there's a substantial decrease in fuel economy. A lot of this is dependent on the powerplant(s) and power gird in question, though.
Basic thermodynamics can lead you down some sensible, but totally wrong, thought paths. Thermodynamically speaking, hybrid vehicles should be ridiculously inefficient. We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Except that
a. most of the vehicles were kept in a specialized lease program that generally didn't allow the leaser to purchase them at expiration even if they wanted to. You're claiming to know how people who weren't allow to vote would have voted there. Very few of these vehilces are in the hands of actual owners today. There are people wanting to purchase one even today who simply can't get one. GM isn't selling, even at prices above the initial new value.
b. The State of California decided in the middle of the 3 year lease program, that inductive charging was out, and only conductive charging would qualify a vehicle for the state's 0-emissions tax breaks. (That's from GMs own letter to EV1 leasers)
c. At that time, there were about 210 stations with inductive paddle charging in the state of California, and about 80 stations in Ga. and Fla. If you lived in any of the other 47 states, you couldn't get charging. Over 1/2 the Ca. stations were in the process of converting to a smaller paddle size when the Ca. board announced its decision, and GM had to eat all those costs at once, plus in some cases drivers had to deal with their local stations being down for days or weeks as part of the policy turn-around.
d. GM mentioned in their same letter that some people had asked to get out of the lease program early. Yes, that might support your statement, but there has never been an automobile leased in numbers where some people didn't want out early. GM hasn't disclosed what the percentages were, and saying that less than absolute perfect consumer satisfaction was a factor in their decisions isn't really telling the rest of us anything. You can infer suckage from that if you want, but there are several alternate inferences. Ca's decision alone was certainly enough to make the program unprofitable, so this and other subsidiary factors cited in the letters seem to be just additional justifications for a decision already made.
e. The 1997 model 1 had very poor range, with some leasers reporting as little as 40 miles on a charge. Suckage indeed. However the 1999 Model 2 used a Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery array, and was officially rated for 100 Miles. A substantial number of users reported it did far better than the rated milage, typically reporting 140 to 180 miles/charge for mixed highway/city. This is the origin of some of the claims that the project was deliberately screwed up - why would GM underate its own product? Leasers also praised the car's pickup and sportscar like handling. Apparently there were weight savings from NiMH that made the second generation quite a bit better in multiple respects.
e. The design had near instantanious heating and cooling for the passenger cabin, and, at least for the Model 2, near noiseless driving (I don't know that the first designe wasn't quiet as well, just that I haven't seen leters specifically praising it as I have the 2nd. generation). Offsetting this was charging time and limited range, but just offhand I'd suspect that the charging station problem, making that range more for round trips than one way, was a more important factor, and that came almost entirely from the state government's actions.
Who is John Cabal?
So, if I understand this the reason we don't have mass-market electric cars is because big auto, oil, and government don't want them. The market does, but no one will make the cars, right?
It seems to me that if there really is a large market for electric cars someone would be making them. If GM, Ford, and Chrysler stay out of the market, that just makes it easier for a smaller startup to get in. I agree with your statement that an electric car would be easier to make and maintain, resulting in less profit for automakers. I agree that strategic planners at the big automakers may HOPE the electric car never takes off. I don't believe there is anything stopping an entrepreneur from giving this market a try.
I would buy one. I don't think many others would.
I waited three months for one of the first Priuses and a whole year for the hybrid Highlander. But GM wouldn't do even that much. BTW, the Prius was heavily subsidized by Toyota before the economy of scale tipped over into profit.
Sure you can, just not in terms of miles-per-gallon. You have to use the lowest common denominator: BTUs per mile.
Your average 2-ton gasoline automobile uses about 6350 BTUs of energy per mile, and your average 240-ton electric light rail train uses about 1150 BTUs per mile. I would imagine a battery-electric vehicle probably does a bit better than a commuter train.
Let's look at rail transport, which has already gone through this battle almost a century ago. Electric vehicles are more efficient. This was plainly obvious to the railroads very early on. Railroads switched to diesel-electric in the 1960s, which was really taking an old concept (there were a few 100% electrified railroads like Oregon Electric Railway and others by the 1930s, running off overhead wires like many light rail and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor and Florida Funnel lines do today) and making it portable (bringing the power plant along for the ride by installing a few generators on board).
And if you want anecdotal evidence, next time you get stuck at a busy railroad crossing near a rail yard (thus trains speeding up as they leave), watch the locomotive exhaust. It's hardly noticable. Now when the gates go up, look for a dumptruck and watch how much soot it blows out. And the locomotive has four engines roughly the size of the dump truck's cab....
Help us build a better map!
you are forgetting that not all power is created at fossile fuel burning power plant.
.24 + .24*20% = .29 wow, that seems aweful close to your number for efficiency of a gas car! and we even left out a number of other types of clean power generation.
so for the sake of argument let's just assume your numbers are correct. you said a gas car is roughly 30% efficient. i read several other comments mentioning that 20% of power in the US is generated via nuclear power. we will even forget that some power is also generated via other clean methods such as wind solor or hydro.
so taking this into account that makes our car suddenly 20% more efficient since 20%+ of the power isn't from fossile fuels so...
also it takes a lot of energy to refine gas from crude oil. so that should be added into your calculations for the efficiency of a gas car. generally most fossil fuel plants don't use the same fuels you burn in your car, so you would probably have to take into account the refining of their fuel as well.
now 3/4 of statistics are made up on the spot so take this with a grain of salt. maybe my math is bad or there is some other flaw in my argument, but the point i wanted to make is that the efficiency isn't as simple as you are trying to make it out to be.
Batteries.
No vehicle in the world has, either before or after, had the sheer volume of batteries of the EV1. The expected lifespan of the batteries was the same as the expected life of the lease. No one in their right mind would buy a car knowing that in 3 to 5 years, another $50K would have to be plunked down to replace the entire array of batteries.
There's no magic or mystery here. The car was killed because it wasn't sustainable.
Don't believe me? Come see me someday. I'll show you the lab where a good chunk of the technology was developed.
Don't know; Don't care; Don't ask
In addition, GM had to maintain custom service centers for these cars. These batteries lead to lethal voltages. Take the car down to Joe's Garage and Joe would likely fry himself to a crisp. And GM would have been liable. Everything about these cars was expensive, and GM was right to destroy them.
GM's biggest flaw wasn't in killing the EV1, it was killing it 6 years too late. It was obvious that California wasn't going to get Zero-Emissions vehicles, and most automakers were thumbing their noses at California by ignoring the mandate and developing hybrid vehicles. GM, however, continued to believe that the Golden State was serious, only to find the state backing out of the Zero-Emissions mandate at the last minute, effectively killing any potential return GM could get by becoming the *only* carmaker allowed to sell cars under California law.
Don't know; Don't care; Don't ask
However, fossil fuels are only 50% of US electric generation
I happen to be looking in on this for something on another board, and I have some differing information.
In 2004, about 71% of the power generated came from coal; petroleum; natural or other gases (read: methane for the former, and butane, propane, and similar for the latter); and wood. About 20% came from nuclear, 7% from hydroelectric, and 2% from other renewables.
Source: Energy Information Administration
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Actually, many major cities in China have hybrid buses. They look like trams but run on wheels instead of tracks. The electric part on top of the bus can disconnect from the power grid while turning or if the bus goes out of the city.
When was the last time you did your research, early-1990s?
Every modern hybrid today (Prius 1997, Insight 1999) have used regenerative braking, or have tried to.
o Highway? Toyota's HSD (Hybrid Synergy Drive) puts the engine into maximal efficient RPMs while you drive and then pumps the excess energy into the battery.
o Slowing down? Engine drag is simulated through regenerative braking until battery is overcharged, then it goes into compression drag.
o Engine braking especially going downhill? Aggressive regenerative braking until the battery is full.
o Coming off the freeway? Again, very light regenerative braking before you even hit the brakes.
It's not just plain red-tail light regenerative braking you're thinking of.
Supercaps? That would be nice, but I think Toyota threw out that idea already. There's a few modders on the Prius using Can-view to watch the voltages going in and out of the plain NiMH system as well as total state of charge.
Have you read-up on China since the 1980s? They're second only to the USA in their love for cars. Traffic jams and pollution/smog are very common sights there. You certainly don't see the streets packed with bicycles anymore...
Didn't you ever wonder why China would be trying to buy-up American oil/gas companies like Chevron? China is planning to establish a blue water (peace time) navy just for that purpose. Since the US undeniably has complete control over the worlds oceans, and China depends so much on ships brining in oil, they want to be able to ensure that their economy can't be potentially sabotaged by the US.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
1. GM sponsors an entry in the first Solar Race Across Australian
2. GM's Sunraycer runs away from the competition
3. a. The board says, "rah rah, good PR opportunity. Now back to our business of making gasoline-powered cars."
b. The engineer CEO says, "Build me a prototype, I want GM to be a leader instead of playing perpetual catch-up!" The board says, Are you sure? Might give those crazy CARB regulators ideas...
4. Impact prototype shows in the January 1990 L.A. autoshow. By November, CARB had a spiffy new Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate on the books.
5. Engineer CEO says, "we can do this!", and starts going all-out to meet the ZEV mandate.
6. 1992: Recession! GM misses profit forecasts. The engineer CEO is kicked out, and replaced with a beancounter.
7. Beancounter CEO says, "look, this EV1 project is a decade away from being profitable, and we're cashing in on every Suburban we sell. Our only hope is to spend $1.50 lobbying against the crazy mandate for every $1.00 we spend on EV1 development."
8. GM splits into two parts - a section that believed in the project, and a section that believed in making Suburbans.
9. GM shows a diesel-electric 4 passenger 80mpg hybrid at a 1997 autoshow. Never shown again. GM proceeds to let Toyota clean their clock in the hybrid game...
10. GM loses several billion dollars last year on declining sales of Suburbans, while Toyota and Honda (which build cars too) enjoy substantial profits.
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blah blah, sure I'm missing something. Above points partially inspired by this electric car group post, and Alan Cocini's memoir (Electrical Engineer extraordinaire, who saw the writing on the wall and left soon after the engineer CEO was kicked out).
GM could've been a leader, as electric cars with an onboard generator are now all the rage. Instead they spent a couple years cashing in on SUV sales, and now they're irrelevant. With a visionless management, they'll certainly be in bankruptcy court soon.
The post linked to above is quite lucid, so I'm going to copy it in part here:
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
While it's true that a battery-only car is still fossil fuel powered in the end
While your statement applies to much of the US, here in BC, Canada we use mostly Hydroelectric power... which isn't really consumed in use. And of course, many places use other power sources such as nuclear, tidepool generators, etc.
Errr, I these cars were leased, not sold. GM did that so that they could get them all back and deal with maintenace issues at the same time. See the Wikipedia entry for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1.
I don't comment all that much, but there are some points being missed.
1. The big automakers got hefty grants/tax breaks to research said cars. This served three functions. First, it denied it to other companies by sucking up money that could go to future competitors. Next, it's free money and good publicity. Finally, if they did hit something magic, they'd get it...as opposed to the other companies.
2. Let's talk about cars of the future for a moment. Think about how many small companies are out there, with good ideas and noble goals, going to trade shows and conventions for VC? Where they talk about the challenges and successes they've had? The entrenched automakers applies pressure with their money to put a PR edge on the shows...company A wants to promote their ideas? We bump them from the speaking schedule, kick them out to being a small booth that now only 1% of the attendees now see, and no investors hear a pitch.
GE had a car, deliberately sabotaged it, and then claims it is a failure. Where does this put venture capital for new electric car companies? Nobody's going to buy into it now.
It also says "I will never drive further than 50 miles from home because I have to get back before my charge runs out" It says "I don't understand how electicity is actually generated by polluting coal fired generators on most cities, before being transmitted hundreds of miles to be stored in a heavy and inefficient storage medium"
How about asking those who actually drove them every day?
I drove the Smithsonian's car here in San Diego for two years. (Yes, the very same car. See http://www.ka9q.net/ev/). After that, I drove another EV1 for three years.
The EV1 was a great car, a lot of fun to drive, and it met nearly all of my needs. I don't know about you, but none of my other cars could do 0-60 in 7 seconds, and I considered that pretty spectacular. In fact, my gasoline car went unused for so long that I lent it to a friend. I had a charger at home, and I was also lucky enough to have one at work. (Truth be told, I didn't really need the charger at work.) Since those are the two places my car spends most of its time parked, it was nearly always fully charged when I came out to drive it. I never had to go out of my way to a gas station (except to use the car wash), and I hardly ever had the need to drive more than its range in a single day. On the rare occasions I traveled out of town, my EV1 could still take me to the airport. And on the even rarer occasions I needed to drive out of town, my EV1 could easily take me to the local Enterprise lot where I could rent a vehicle more suited to the purpose (such as a SUV for desert camping).
The charge port problem to which you refer was only in the Gen 1, model year 1997, which includes my first car. It was caused by a defective capacitor which had already been removed in the Gen 2 (1999 model year) design. I know of no problems with Gen 2 cars, and I'm pretty sure I would have had there been one.
This is what's so frustrating about having been an EV1 driver: knowing from personal experience just how great a car it was, and seeing others without that experience mouth total gibberish. But I guess we just have to educate people one by one.
They NEVER sold them. This is a well known fact.
How is it complete BS gets such a high mod score?