The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold
theautopian.com
theautopian.com
My school apparently had no idea what it was for years and it just sat outside underneath the EE building and people would draw dicks in the dust on it. When they realized what it was, they immediately yonked it inside and made a student team to refurb it.
It's super cool I got to see such a piece of history and rare car even if I didn't realize it for so long.
Before: https://images.hgmsites.net/med/gm-ev1-electric-car-at-misso...
Slapped a dillo late one night after walking through that tunnel.
Absolutely hilarious that he managed to work the "doesn't work it if pops up as stolen" angle in the opposite direction to make the car impossible to really do anything with (i.e. no junkyard can take it whole, no subsequent changes of title can happen) and live in various sorts of limbo for 20yr.
[0] - https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...
I was hoping for a Deliverator. Alas, it was nowhere near as cool.
Insurance would need to be from a specialty provider who do insure oddball vehicles. Someone I know (in CA no less) insured his homemade electric motorcycle this way. (It’s titled as the chassis of the BMW regular motorcycle it was built from.)
If you’re pulled over, you would need to show things like seat belts or turn signals and so on. I got nailed for not having a shoulder belt in a homemade vehicle made after 1960. Seat belt ticket was my punishment, although the cop remarked that adding a shoulder belt would be a good idea.
As I understand BYD use less components than the other traditional car manufacturers (more brains/integration in axle vs having lots of CAN connected shit around the car) so in theory I could see builders installing a BYD drivetrain into an old chassis the same way people can do LS swaps into Miatas.
They're on sale in Europe where the car safety standards are slightly different to the US, but generally considered more rigorous.
But yes, the vehicles which aren't on sale typically haven't been homologated. Why invest the time and money in that when it's not needed?
Actually deemed unsafe and not meeting the rules is much rarer, e.g. Tesla CyberTruck in Europe. (2)
In either case, you may get away with owning it, but not driving it on public roads.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homologation https://www.productipedia.com/kb/productipedia/compliance-re...
2) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
I wouldn't be surprised if they've already designed the core components of their cars (like the chassis) that they sell in Europe to meet American standards anyway. Stuff like the height and orientation of headlights can be modified more cheaply later when they want to enter the US market.
This article has some info about it and other things: https://www.jalopnik.com/here-s-how-people-illegally-import-...
Even by sketchers and jorts standards that's still, wow. The way that article is just dripping with post-boot saliva is a great illustration of the gulf between high class "porche or miata + Land<cruiser/rover>" type car enthusiasts and "buys whole cars for parts" type enthusiasts. Hopefully Doug's opinions have, uh, refined, over the last decade. Can't see how they wouldn't have.
What's legal per the law is a tiny fraction of what you can put on a DMV form and have the form get past the clerk and process properly which itself is a tiny fraction of what the cops will go after.
Scrapyards will take fractions of cars without asking questions. People who part out cars or deal in scrap metal know this and will take anything off your hands for free as long as the work vs what they're getting pencils out.
Even if they know you they'll never take a full car body in one piece without a title or any of the other "open and shut case" violations of law because they don't wanna risk getting Randy Weaver'd because a good customer had government problems and became an "informant".
The border crossing there is very busy so that could be a annoying.
Buying a HMMWV (Humvee) is no problem and they can generally be registered in most states. Thousands of them were also sold new directly to civilians as the Hummer H1.
Meant to expedite purging jalopies, this, of course, is horribly ripe for abuse by predatory tow companies.
For reference: the first generation Nissan Leaf had similar range to the EV1. I still have one of these. It's our family's second car, and has run flawlessly for over 10 years with virtually zero maintenance. Range is still about 60 miles per charge.
BTW... despite the antics of Musk, I think he was absolutely instrumental in advancing car electrification. Yes there were others making EVs, but Tesla was the first to make them cool and in so doing force the rest of the industry to move. Without Tesla dragging the industry kicking and screaming into EVs I think we'd still be stuck with almost 100% ICE cars. China might have done it, but that's because they don't have the same sunk cost in ICE engines we have.
But with a combination of throwing a lot of money at the problem, being in the right place at the right time, and good execution, they managed to scale up the high end of the market enough to eventually move (somewhat) down-market.
Musk clearly has (or at least had) a great skill when it comes to scaling companies doing hard things. If he had one under his belt, like Tesla, I'd be willing to chalk it up to luck, but he has two: Tesla and SpaceX. Both have been spectacular successes doing things most people run away from screaming with their tail between their legs, namely volume production of innovative cars and aerospace.
IMHO SpaceX is a lot more impressive. There's an old joke: how do you become a millionaire? A: start as a billionaire and found an aerospace company.
I think without him Tesla would have been a boutique car company. They would have made expensive boutique cars for a subset of visionary EV early adopters, but would not have moved the industry. To move the industry you have to grow hard and fast enough to scare legacy car makers into trying to play catch-up, which is what Tesla did. The only other thing I can imagine moving big car makers like this would have been the government mandating an EV transition. Big bureaucratic things only move when kicked.
People hate acknowledging this because Musk's politics have turned so many people off, but unfortunately there appears to be no correlation between skills in one domain and being a generally well adjusted human being. The world doesn't work this way. A person can be good at something and still be a lunatic or an asshole.
I mean... if we dismissed all achievement of people who were assholes or lunatics, we'd basically have to throw out 2/3 of all music.
If anything there might be a slight negative correlation between extreme skill in some domain and being well adjusted, for a variety of reasons including the weird way people treat "savants" in any field. I also suspect a big one is that people with messed up backgrounds (bad childhood, etc.) or psychological issues sometimes "over-compensate" by achieving hyper-skill in some area.
There's a correlation. He's "successful" precisely because he's a lunatic/asshole.
I think that Musk/Tesla gave Politicians the idea that everyone can go electric and as a result it ended up being mandated into law. Then manufacturers had to try to make cars which were electric.
Is there some technical contribution by Musk I'm unaware of?
I don't know, but I'd bet it wasn't "cheap second car" low.
On top of that I'm pretty sure the unit economics were firmly in the negative, even discounting the R&D costs.
They were pretty remarkable though—I got a chance to drive a pre-production one at a ride-and-drive a year before and was super impressed.
> Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 American documentary film directed by Chris Paine that explores the creation, limited commercialization and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid-1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the federal government of the United States, the California government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
And from the same director in 2011:
There were ~30,000 electric cars around at the start of the 20th century, so I’m not sure this holds up.
Edit: apparently Columbia built 1,937 electric cars in 1904 alone according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(automobile_brand).
> Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 American documentary film directed by Chris Paine that explores the creation, limited commercialization and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid-1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the federal government of the United States, the California government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
And from the same director in 2011:
It's like machine guns, you're not paying for the hardware. You're paying to not have the state send a squad of thugs to shoot you for not getting permission. People don't want the permission. They want the hardware. So they just get the hardware and keep it on the down low.
Also, everyone in automotive who isn't an OEM or in the emissions racket (i.e. the two groups benefitting) absolutely hates the government and this is exactly the kind of "interesting" vehicle junkyard people would save for their own personal golf cart use. Usually OEMs are super anal about making sure stuff actually gets crushed but they shat out too many EV1s into the world to do a good job of that like they do for prototypes, test mules and other stuff with low double digit production runs if that.
Hmm, you could get a swatting 2.0 by taking real video and shoving in some LLm generated scenes of people showing off their machine gun (parts) pretty easy.
The owner already has an electric S10 as well, and the RAV4 both which use the same charging system as the EV1 so I'm just glad its an enthusiast who will rebuild it and run it.
You can get businesses making replicas in small numbers, for example, I am sure you could get a Lancia Stratos, however, would GM have a big copyright ban on such a venture?
Copyright law for art and sculpture requires registration of each design; in searching the copyright records it appears that GM doesn't do this. Really the more appropriate forum would be to get a design patent but those last for only 15 years anyway.
Trademarks must be registered (and also apply to specific categories, though a kit car and production car are in the same category). Surprisngly, "EV1" is owned not by GM, but by Kia (the graphic is different). What this means is you can make the (GM) EV1 logo no problem, and also sell a kit car as something like "inspired by the GM EV1" but if you sell it as an "EV1" then Kia might come knocking.
In short, I don't see much getting in the way of making an EV1 kit car as long as you don't advertise it as a literal GM or EV1 car. Though as stated, you can include or sell separately an EV1 badge that buyers can slap on their own property without issue.
Also, trademarks do not need to be registered to be enforced, although it is wise to register them.
(They make reproductions of 1967 and 1968 Mustangs)
For newer cars, you could probably register it as a self-built (kit car).
And while a big box insurance company might not insure a heavily modified vehicle, there are niche insurance companies who will. Or you could even self insure in a state that allows it.
I think 200 miles is on the low end of what they could achieve with LFP chemistry.
I really wish a car manufacturer would bring back the EV1 form factor with modern EV batteries.
Despite being a two seater the EV1 is not that small, it's a fraction longer than the Chevy Bolt. I can't see any reason the EV1 form factor would sell today.
Or the first-gen Honda Insight.
Take a look at those, and the Citroën CX from 25 years earlier. The CX is what a four-door Insight would have looked like.
For me, it's the faired-in rear wheels and narrower track that does it. Instantly futuristic.
It's difficult enough for automakers to sell standard sedans these days, never mind an electric one ($$$) designed around efficiency above all else.
The average gas price today in Texas is $2.60. It is not really economically rational for someone to pay a premium for an efficiency-focused EV without some other benefit.
I think the closest to what you're asking for is the Model 3, or Ioniq 6: appliance sedans built around efficiency.
They don't sell as well as their SUV cousins.
> Because the car left the State, Sawyer had little recourse. “The cop says, ‘Well, the car’s out of State, contact the FBI.’ And I tried to contact the FBI, but they weren’t interested,” he tells me.
I dont understand this part of the story. So if somene steals a car and drives it out of state only FBI can search for it and they dont???
Doesnt this mean legalization of crime?
If it works on the car, will it work on other things too, that they just look the other way?
The FBI does not investigate all reported crimes, and neither do state and local law enforcement, so yeah... if you do crime that nobody wants to investigate, you can get away with it; at least until those meddling kids show up.
Of course, this is simply my speculation.