I watched this documentary on Planet Green channel last night. The whole thing progresses like a grassy knoll conspiracy, how big corporations, George W. Bush, big oil, and Ronald Reagan all conspired to kill the electric car.
It said that the batteries were perfectly fine, which goes counter to what I’ve heard.
Anyways, what was the deal with GM destroying all of the EV-1s? Why didn’t they allow the lessees to buy them instead of destroying them? I’m sure that there is a legitimate reason other than the conspiracy put forth by the show…
Nothing to contribute except that the Google add for this thread is a link to a Chrysler webpage about their new line of electric cars…
The understanding I had about electric cars was that they were great, except for the relatively short legs they had (only 60 miles or so for the earlier examples), which would not be as much of a concern for someone who mainly commuted to work every day and did not have to worry about long drives (you could, in theory, own the electric car and use it to get to work, then rent something from Enterprise or buy Greyhound tickets for when you needed to leave town every few months for a weekend trip to Grandma’s).
Also, I have heard that the footprint for an electric car may not have been much smaller than that for a gas car, simply because fuel still had to be burned to power them, only now it was typically coal in a powerplant somewhere instead of gasoline or diesel under your hood. That said, I dunno what the relative pollutive effects are of a 4 cylinder engine versus burning enough coal in a power plant to power an electric car. Could still be a plus in the Electric car’s corner.
Hybrid cars combined some of the benefits of electric cars with some of the strengths of internal combustion engines (more power when you need it plus the ability to switch to an electric moter when you don’t need the raw torque, like when you are waiting at the light or cruising on the highway)
That’s mostly disinformation. It’s easier to control pollution at one large source than at thousands of individual sources. Also, if I were to own an electric car here in Chicago, the vast majority of the electricity I would consume would come from ComEd’s various nuclear plants.
Whether coal or oil is better depends on your goals. Coal has the advantage that we have centuries worth of it right here in the US of A, so we don’t have to be dependent on countries that don’t like us very much to get it. On the other hand, though, on a per-energy basis, coal produces significantly more CO[sub]2[/sub] than oil does, so it’s worse from an environmental basis.
Of course, there are other ways of producing electricity that produce less carbon dioxide, and which are practical for power plants but not for cars directly, but practically speaking, most electricity in the US comes from coal.
While I don’t know much about the EV-1 project, both of these two questions have pretty simple answers, most likely. If you sell something, you have to continue to make parts and supply support for it and so on. Maintaining a whole infrastructure for the support of a piddling number of vehicles out on the road might not have been worth it.
And of course they would be destroyed. All cars that aren’t sold are melted down and made into new cars. Cars are recycled to a far greater extent than soda cans, I’m fairly certain.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Companies have no obligation to service vehicles they sell aside from PR and customer satisfaction. Considering the negative response from reclaiming the EV-1s simply relegating the parts and service to third party vendors would have been much better in those aspects. When GM “sold” the EV-1 it was essentially a large field test. The vehicles were only available for lease and when the lease was up GM took back the cars, they could not be purchased.
The big question is why GM preferred to only lease cars as opposed to selling them and what benefit there was to removing them from the field once the evaluation phase was complete. I’m sure it had a lot to do with wanting to avoid being associated with an experimental technology which would presumably fail in the long run due to it’s young life. The wisdom of this fear is worth questioning and if there were any political motives beyond that. One can assume that it was more expensive to reclaim and dispose of all those cars as opposed to simply ending support for them and letting the owners deal with maintaining them and disposing of them.
What the CTers ignore is that the EV-1 was NOT a production car but a large-scale experiment. It was created as a large-scale experiment; it was sold to the lessees as a large-scale experiment. It was never intended to be anything but a large-scale experiment and when it was done and they had the data they needed they ended the large-scale experiment and junked a bunch of cars that they had never intended to keep or release to the public, for the reasons given and because (again) it was a large-scale experiment. Like Chrysler’s turbocars in the 60s.
To show the magnificant strides made in electric car technology recently, in 1907 the Detroit Electric car could regularly get 80 miles out of a single charge. Of course, this was at a speed of 20 mph. I have read that in one test one of these cars made 211.3 miles. Don’t know how much of that was downhill, though.
It’s sort of interesting. In 1969 I bought a brand new Volkswagen Squareback. I remember mentioning to my wife that this would probably be the last gasoline car I ever bought - the next car would surely be electric. Still waiting.
Although your starting point is a movie, your questions seem to be factually, rather than artistically, oriented, so I’m going to move this from Cafe Society to General Questions.
Except if someone shows up needing a part while the car is still in the lemon law period-- they can’t fix the problem because there’s no parts and the car company gets to buy the person a new car!
That’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison taking the record mileage of one car and the average mileage of another. Realistically, the performance gain of the EV-1 over the turn-of-the-last-century electrics wasn’t that spectacular and had mostly to due with advances in chassis design than any great advances in electric motor or battery technology. (although the batteries were definitely a lot safer and less maintenance intensive in the EV-1).
On a more general note, what do you think would have happened if GM had started marketing these things in the mid-90’s? Through 20/20 hindsight, we can see that it might have positioned them well for the later-2000’s, but I can remember when gas got under $1/gallon in 1999. Would these really have sold?
The biggest problem, and the one that has made development of a practical electric vehicle so difficult, is the difference between the energy density of gasoline and a lead acid battery. The following is from a University of Oregon web site.
Energy Density of Some Materials (KHW/kg)
Gasoline --------------------------> 14
Lead Acid Batteries ----------------> 0.04
Gasoline is 350 times better at energy storage than an equivalent weight of batteries. That’s hard to compete with.
I know at my work we use electric fork lifts. An electric battery is ideal for fok lifts because they need the extra counter weight in them. The batteries on our fork lifts can last for days without recharging depending on usage.
