Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> That decision, and the fury it sparked among EV1 lessees who fought to keep their cars, is the subject of Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” It is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the auto industry, oil companies, regulators, and consumer culture shaped the trajectory of electric transportation. Paine does not let anyone off the hook easily, and the film holds up as both a piece of investigative storytelling and a snapshot of an industry at a crossroads.

The conspiracy about GM killing the EV1 is very hyperbolic and the documentary is mostly a fantasy.

Carmakers releasing test cars to markets and then destroying them was a common practice - GM did the same with their hydrogen cars, the famous turbine engine cars, and even large scale prototypes like the Aerovette. In many cases they were only able to circumvent safety/testing regulation because these were not registerable cars.

Even if the market tests were successful, the only placed they planned to sell them was California as a compliance car for CARB. No matter how you try to spin it, a lead-acid battery powered car was not ever going to be the car of the future.

> Carmakers releasing test cars to markets and then destroying them was a common practice - GM did the same with their hydrogen cars, the famous turbine engine cars, and even large scale prototypes like the Aerovette. In many cases they were only able to circumvent safety/testing regulation because these were not registerable cars.

The EV1 wasn't just a "test car". It was a production vehicle which was built (as you said) to comply with the California ZEV mandate, which GM also spent millions lobbying against, and eventually defeating, while they were contracting with an outside engineering firm to design the EV1.

TTBOMK, GM didn't spend millions lobbying against turbine engine and hydrogen fuel cell tech.

http://www.evnut.com/carb_ruling.htm

> It was a production vehicle which was built (as you said) to comply with the California ZEV mandate.

It was never a true production car - none of the cars GM leased were registerable because they did not have a finalized production design submitted to safety or (ironically) EPA standards.

Technically GM did lobby against hydrogen fuel cell tech at the same time because the ZEV mandate specifically also included hydrogen as a potential solution. But no one is accusing GM of also killing the hydrogen car just because it made it less far along the development process.

I know it's the real controversial opinion - but nobody was wrong. The experience of CARB more or less proved that a successful EV was not immediately available. But mass hybridization probably resulted in more measurable emissions savings than the original 10% ZEV goal ever would have.

Wait didn't they have a NiMH battery too?

Eventually, near the end. The first run of them was lead-acid; the battery was about 60% of the weight of the vehicle.

Yes, the exact same battery technology Toyota was already using in their Prius, which is still in-use in many Toyota hybrid models still on the road. The battery was not the problem.

Prius had 0.91 kWh battery and the EV1 had 26.4 kWh with NiMH. The EV1 was expensive, $80k to produce in 1996 money. A large part of that had to be the battery.

And despite that expensive battery, it could only go about 100 miles on a charge. For a point of reference, my old Tesla has a nominal 85kWh battery, which I think is actually about 77kWh usable, so about 3x the capacity. And its range is somewhat weak compared to what's typical today.

It's a pretty decent approximation to say that the battery is the only problem for EVs. Everything else is either standard car stuff, or small/cheap/simple enough not to be a major problem. Nearly all of the progress in EVs that we've seen since the EV1 has been down to battery improvements. Take the EV1 and give it a modern battery and it'll be pretty decent. Take any modern EV and give it a 1999 battery and it'll be absolutely awful.

100 miles on a single charge is phenomenal by early 2000's standards.

Car buyers don't give you a mulligan for being great compared to existing tech. There's a reason EVs didn't start to really catch on until about 20 years later. 100 miles is great for late 1990s EV, but craptastic for a late 1990s automobile. Especially for a cheap-looking two-seater that cost as much to produce as a decent luxury sedan.

I used to have a '16 Ford Focus EV and it could only go about 80 km on a charge. This turns out to be plenty enough to drive kids to school, drive downtown from the burbs, work a day, drive home, and have maybe 15-20km left on the thing for an emergency. As a second car alongside a gas SUV that got used maybe once a fortnight, it was fantastic; I honestly believe that there's a huge potential for smaller, lighter, simpler EVs that don't need the 3500 pound battery my new EV rides on top of.

There is a big market for it, but I don’t think that market exists until you go another 10+ years down the road. And then that market will likely be largely filled by used EVs.

The problem I see is that many people are skeptical of EVs, most people don’t have experience with EVs or any existing EV infrastructure (a charger at home), and having an extra car kind of sucks (parking, registration, insurance, etc).

The first Nissan Leaf models had a comparable 24kWh (Li-ion) battery, for comparison. They can still be viable used cars for city driving and affordable to drive (particularly right now). Until earlier this month we had a business in our city which restored and recycled, primarily, Nissan Leafs and their batteries. The loss of EV incentives with the Trump administration may have been the primary reason for their recent closure.

You couldn't go far on those early Prius batteries. I had a circa-2009 Prius and semi-intentionally ran out of gas to see what happened. I was able to drive a couple of miles to a gas station, but the battery was depleting extremely quickly, and I doubt it would have lasted ten minutes.

NiMH batteries suck too

Yes, and unlike what has been done in the Prius, these were large-format cells. The patents on them ultimately ended up sold to a Chevron subsidiary, which would only license the technology under absurd terms. They assumed that lithium-based battery technologies wouldn't be suitable. Oops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...

> The patents on them ultimately ended up sold to a Chevron subsidiary, which would only license the technology under absurd terms.

Yet another example of why intellectual property and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

The earliest prototypes of what would become the Tesla Roadster used lead acid batteries.

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