I guess the enviormentalists are all happy, and that is good, but for me it is good news for the american auto industry.
All these years of pandering to the big three has made them stupid and uncompetitive.
A few weeks ago I was listening to the CEO of GM telling Couric that we are not stupid, so she asks him about crushing thousand of the EVI's and spending millions of dollars to lobby against a California law and get it repealed.
He shrugs sheepishly and says in hindsight that was not such a good idea. A week later I hear a GM flack repeating the same old lies about nobody wanted to buy them. See links below.
Now we have the Chevy Volt coming out in two years. Whoop de do.
On August 16, 2000, after over five months of driving numerous rental cars paid for by GM, I took delivery of a new Gen II (1999 model year) EV1 with nickel-metal-hydride batteries. It was great to be back in an EV1 again.
On August 15, 2003, my Gen II EV1 lease expired, and I was forced turned it back in. I was given no option to extend the lease or buy the car, and word has it that GM is destroying these cars. So I felt like I was euthanizing a young and perfectly healthy family pet.
It was bad enough that GM dug in its heels early and refused to build more than a token number of EV1s. But refusing to allow satisfied, paying customers to keep their existing cars was simply beyond the pale. GM gave its official reasons: lack of demand (see below), the cost of stocking spare parts (for a car that required virtually no maintenance!) and the state standardizing on conductive charging (which won't kick in until the end of the decade). These excuses were so transparently lame as to deeply insult the intelligence of every EV1 driver.
The real reason, I suspect, is much simpler. GM thought they could produce a good EV, deliberately make it hard to get, and then point to their small numbers to escape the California government mandate to make EVs more generally available. But GM was caught totally off-guard by the popularity of the EV1, and their plan began to backfire. Despite virtually no marketing, a sales force that actively discouraged interest, and severe restrictions (the car was available only in a few California and Arizona cities, and was never offered for sale, only lease) nearly every EV1 made was leased, and about 1,000 people were waiting in line if any more were ever produced. (Naturally, GM denies the existence of any waiting list, but we have ample evidence that it did, albeit informally.)
So when GM filed suit against the California Air Resources Board's ZEV mandate, it could no longer tolerate the vocal enthusiasm of the EV1 drivers belying the claim that "nobody wants EVs". So it decided to take its marbles and go home. And the saddest thing of all is that their "big-lie" propaganda campaign worked. CARB backed down, the EV1 drivers' spirits are broken, and the man on the street seems to "just know" (because he heard it on a talk show) that "EVs don't work". Sometimes the bad guys do win. Sigh.
I will never buy another car from GM. Admittedly this isn't much of a sacrifice on my part because -- with the sole exception of the EV1 -- I have never been impressed by GM's otherwise mediocre products. I still have nothing but admiration for the GM engineering team that built the EV1, and for the few dedicated marketers who really seemed to believe in it. But I have nothing but utter contempt for the cynical GM managers who methodically killed it. Think of them the next time you're waiting in a long line at a gas station, breathing fumes and smog, listening to the radio for news of the latest American war in an oil-rich Middle Eastern country.
My First EV1 Is In The Smithsonian!
Who Killed The Electric Car
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