EV-1 for Lease (1996)
loe.org
loe.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uep5zOrsAEA
Incredible documentary about the politics around EV's made before Tesla's became mainstream.
People were demanding and protesting asking GM to let time buy their EV'1 after the lease, but they destroyed all the cars. So did Toyota for the EV RAV4's.
I went to school in the metro Detroit area, and I still remember when GM brought an EV1 prototype to my middle school.
They seemed so excited about it, I was shocked to hear it got shelved when it did.
After BEVs became normal, the guys who made them common are supposedly just idiots who got lucky. Presumably history will write LLM inventors as lucky morons as well. And space rocket manufacturers and GLP-1 (and associated) drug makers.
Everything is impossible because of lizard men until one day someone does it and then they were just lucky.
Just because they do it openly and often very stupidly doesn't stop it being a conspiracy.
This very article details this in relation to California regulations pushing for an EV:
>They didn't like it. So all 3 American car makers, including GM, rallied together, spent a lot of money lobbying, also did this in partnership with the oil companies, I'm sorry to say. The oil companies spent far more than the car companies. And the result was that they got this mandate ordered down, delayed, pushed aside last December. And at that point Ford and Chrysler and the other carmakers no doubt heaved huge sighs of relief and thought great, now we don't have to worry about electrics for at least another 5 years. And that was when GM startled them by saying that it had secretly revived the EV-1, and would be coming out with it this fall. So Ford and Chrysler are if anything angrier at GM, because now that this car's going to be a reality, if it succeeds they've got to compete with it.
Edit: that's not to say incumbents are always big companies. They might be homeowners, or taxi drivers.
Man it's already over. It's hard to imagine the US autos EVER catching up at this point, even with state support.
If the EV-1 had been allowed to succeed, who says we wouldn't have had lithium batteries sooner?
[0]https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/articles/battery-articles/pr...
However, it's not like the lead went anywhere so recycling your batteries for new ones every 5 years could be very practical.
Even LiOn batteries have charging patterns as the blocker to adoption, which means that practically, you'd get cars with less than 50% capacity by 2 years.
> Mobil and other oil companies are also shown to be advertising directly against electric cars in national publications, [...] Chevron bought patents and a controlling interest in Ovonics, the advanced battery company featured in the film, ostensibly to prevent modern NiMH batteries from being used in non-hybrid electric cars.
> car makers engaged in both positive and negative marketing of the electric car [...] In later days it ran "award-winning" doomsday-style advertising featuring the EV1 and ran customer surveys which emphasized drawbacks to electronic vehicle technology
> the federal government of the United States under the Presidency of George W. Bush joined the auto-industry suit against California in 2002. This pushed California to abandon its ZEV mandate regulation.
> A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them. A few were disabled and given to museums and universities, but almost all were found to have been crushed. GM never responded to the EV drivers' offer to pay the residual lease value; $1.9 million was offered for the remaining 78 cars in Burbank, California before they were crushed.
Just because you can make it work with a lot of care doesn't mean that most consumers don't want more.
GM just tapped out too early because despite the cars being incredibly popular, they didn't want the short-term hit to the books that a niche product full of brand new technology represents.
Specifically with Elon Muck, media coverage and public opinion are a mass of contradictions. He's the man single handedly destroying his businesses as he is on-track to becoming the worlds first trillionaire. He's just taking credit for the effort of the hard working and clever people who work from him, while seemingly being personally responsible for any incident that occurs.
I realise the man is a walking bag of neuroses with a can-do attitude, but I sometimes wish publications would restrict their reporting to the bad(and indeed good if he decides to do that again) things he actually does, rather than run mutually exclusive accusations.