Who Really Killed the GM EV1?

Nobody asked me but . . .

I’m not a General Motors apologist. They haven’t done a lot right recently. But in the interests of fair and objective reporting, the heat the company is currently (pun intended) taking regarding the EV1 electric car in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? is far from unbiased.

I haven’t seen the movie. Yet. But I was in NYC recently and some friends I work with had. I’m the car guy in this group. They live in Manhattan and most of them don’t own cars. We all agree that “Green” is good. But their view of GM being the Bad Guy here is a result of technical innocence and naiveté on their part, not some vested interest in hitting the big bad GM automotive bureaucracy when it is seriously down.

The reality of the electric car? It’s the answer to the question no one ever posed.

Suppose you came into my car dealership (It’s called Carmudgen Motors and we have a toll-free 800 number: 800 366-8225, which is easier to remember if you use 800 DON’T CALL!) looking for a new car. And suppose I asked you if you’d be interested in the following vehicle: You could drive it for 75-150 miles on a good day before it would have to be plugged into a special home charger, which was about 1.5 feet by 2 feet by 5 feet. It was essentially the size and shape of a gasoline pump.

The electricity the car ran on was produced by batteries that were still in the advanced prototype stage, and I couldn’t tell you exactly how long they would last, but I could guarantee that they would be very expensive to replace.

I’m a damn good car salesman so you might have missed it when, in the paragraph two before this one, I used the expression “on a good day” to describe the car’s range. The Gen 1 batteries got 55-95 miles per charge. Later batteries upped the range to 75-150 miles. Recharging took as much as eight hours for a full charge (although one could get an 80 percent charge in two to three hours. But on a bad day—say a late January day in Michigan or a mid-August day in Washington DC—and that range could easily be halved.

Why? Batteries run down more rapidly the harder you accelerate. Batteries also lose juice when it gets cold. The colder the cold, the lower the juice. And consider the next problem. The EV1 didn’t have a cooling system. Didn’t need one. And where do you suppose the hot air comes from when you crank your gasoline engine over on a cold day and switch on the heater? Riiiiiiiiight! From the coolant circulating through the engine.

So what did the EV1 have instead? Think heat pump. A solution quite a bit less efficient than a conventional cooling system and much slower to provide “heat.” But the EV1 also had a heated steering wheel and seats. And guess where the electricity for heating your hands and your tushy came from? Right, again. From the batteries. And what do you suppose happens to the EV1’s range when some of the charge is diverted to keeping you comfortable?

Spool forward six months to that muggy DC day, temperatures and the humidity hovering in the high 90s. How long do you think that heat pump, now functioning as an air conditioning system, will require to cool the interior of your EV1 to the same level as your wife’s minivan? Er, try never. It just won’t happen. And what is the one thing every American driver demands from his car’s air conditioning system? Right, once again. Instant cool down. Not measured in minutes, but in seconds. Not gonna happen with the EV1.

I guarantee that if our elected officials in Washington DC had been required to drive nothing but EV1s for a year, they would have either quit their jobs (highly unlikely) or they would have seen to it that electric vehicles were legislated or regulated out of existence.

Don’t believe this would happen? We have history here. Remember seatbelt interlocks? Our friends in Washington legislated them into law because most drivers refused to buckle their safety belts. So for a couple of years we had cars that couldn’t be started unless the belts were latched. What a disaster. This solution led to disillusion and frustration by the very people who had passed the interlock law in the first place. And guess what? They undid it, replacing it with automatic belts (Let’s all hear it for the motorized mouse running around the door frame.) and eventually airbags. All because drivers refused to buckle up.

Did I also tell you that the EV1 was strictly a small 2-seat commuter car? Soccer moms and families consisting of more than two consenting adults need not apply.

GM was totally up front in telling “buyers” the EV1 was for “lease only.” It was a way for the company to learn something about all this new technology while also maintaining control of the hardware and software.

And the liability issue is real. Who’s the first name on a lawsuit if your EV1 needs replacement batteries and the companies that built the originals have stopped production?

Until there is a breakthrough in battery technology that allows an auto maker to create an electric vehicle that is as seamless to drive and to refuel as the vehicles consumers currently purchase, the electric vehicle is doomed to a very limited audience of committed Greenies. And there ain’t enough of them for any company to make a serious business case.

I consider those who remain convinced that there is a conspiracy in play here the modern-day equivalents of consumer advocates who believed that the car companies had a 200-mpg carburetor hidden on a high dusty shelf in the fuel systems lab that never saw the light of day because of collusion among the car companies, the oil cartel and the politicians in Washington “owned” by the oil companies.

So, GM, I’m backing you 95 percent in this one with 5 points lost for the fumble out of bounds (no change of possession) by the running back from PRU during his run down the sidelines following the handoff of the EV1 from the quarterback from GM Tech.

GM deserves high marks for putting its technology into, and its corporate face onto, the EV1. Unfortunately, for the biased minority, this is a classic example of the adage: No good deed goes unpunished.