So who did kill the General Motors EV1? Conventional wisdom, as espoused in the 2006 film
Who killed the Electric Car? is that the battery powered vehicle made between 1996 and 1999 was herded into a pen and given a lethal injection because it failed to fit in with the obscene moneymaking urges and generally wicked corporate culture of GM.
But the Australian-born editor of US magazine
Motor Trend (and former
Wheels editor) Angus McKenzie is not so sure.
Writing in
Motor Trend, McKenzie recalled a conversation with GM advanced technology engineer Howard Wilson, who told him about the time of the EV1's launch that the preferred plan had been to make the vehicle a hybrid.
Wilson's plan had been not to use a petrol engine alongside the electric motor but to use a gas turbine, that would operate purely as a battery-charging device. This would make the EV1 a series hybrid, where only the electric motor drives the wheels as opposed to a parallel hybrid where the road wheels can be driven by the electric motor or internal combustion engine.
A turbine was chosen because it could be made to run on anything from petrol to cooking oil, and running at a constant speed would reduce emissions surges caused by the need to throttle up the engine to overcome load.
But political influence got in the way. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) mandated that 2 percent of all vehicles sold in the state had to be zero-emission by 1998 – ruling out the gas turbine hybrid, even though its emissions were minuscule and its efficiency much greater than conventional vehicles.
“The emissions would be tiny,” Wilson told McKenzie, “but we can't do it because the CARB mandate insists on zero emissions.”
An experimental hybrid version using a gas turbine was made and shown at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show but in keeping with the CARB Mandate the production EV1 appeared with lead acid batteries that comprised one third of its weight and gave it a maximum range of 150km.
The rest is history. GM leased about 1000 EV1s, recalled about 500 for issues with the battery-charging technology that could have started a fire, and crushed most of the cars after the program was cancelled in 2003. Toyota built the parallel-hybrid Prius and sold a million of them worldwide in 10 years. Toyota will have had passenger car hybrids on sale for more than 12 years when GM brings out the series-hybrid Chevrolet Volt in 2010.