Elio's time has come again?

[RSchneider]

Just watched this. Worth a peek!

What I like about watching something like that is it proved all of the conspiracy theorists wrong. Many thought big oil and the big 3 were going to kill the EV. Instead, it's that the EV wasn't ready for primetime until Tesla came along and the model after the roadster literally rewrote the book on EV's. Since then, everyone has been playing catch up.

 

[dbacksfan81]

Some things that get lost about the Saturn EV1 is that they were lease vehicles with a closed end agreement that they would be returned at the end of the lease to GM. They were all prototype cars with only about 20% of the parts from the GM parts bin and everything else was all proprietary and not available to the aftermarket to develop parts. As part of the agreement, the vehicles could only be serviced and checked up on by the dealership they were leased from, no other GM dealerships had parts or people qualified to work on them.

They made 660 of the Gen1 and 457 of the Gen2 versions which had hybrids powered by gasoline or compressed natural gas. They did have regenerative braking, but the battery technology was the old style deep cycle batteries that you would find in golf carts.

They also had a S-10 EV1 that they made just under 500 of and of those about 60 were actually sold for fleet services to the military and some municipalities which a very few did make their way into private hands after being sold as surplus by the fleet owners. These were all hand modified with the front wheel drive train from the EV1 and had speed limiters add to them to keep them under 70 MPH. They had a lot of hand built cutting and welding done to them so they were not all alike.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_S-10_EV

The only other car that I can think of that was done this way was the Chrysler Turbine cars of the early 60's.

Was GM a bit short sighted? I would say yes, but the battery technology wasn't there yet and the charging infrastructure was extremely small.

 

[Rickb]

Some things that get lost about the Saturn EV1 is that they were lease vehicles with a closed end agreement that they would be returned at the end of the lease to GM. They were all prototype cars with only about 20% of the parts from the GM parts bin and everything else was all proprietary and not available to the aftermarket to develop parts. As part of the agreement, the vehicles could only be serviced and checked up on by the dealership they were leased from, no other GM dealerships had parts or people qualified to work on them.

They made 660 of the Gen1 and 457 of the Gen2 versions which had hybrids powered by gasoline or compressed natural gas. They did have regenerative braking, but the battery technology was the old style deep cycle batteries that you would find in golf carts.

They also had a S-10 EV1 that they made just under 500 of and of those about 60 were actually sold for fleet services to the military and some municipalities which a very few did make their way into private hands after being sold as surplus by the fleet owners. These were all hand modified with the front wheel drive train from the EV1 and had speed limiters add to them to keep them under 70 MPH. They had a lot of hand built cutting and welding done to them so they were not all alike.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_S-10_EV

The only other car that I can think of that was done this way was the Chrysler Turbine cars of the early 60's.

Was GM a bit short sighted? I would say yes, but the battery technology wasn't there yet and the charging infrastructure was extremely small.

Tesla had the same market demand, battery tech, charging infrastructure, and service issues, but plowed ahead to manufacture the vehicle and make improvements in battery tech and increased range along the way. Creating the charging infrastructure during the process was a smart business plan. The MY is my favorite car in 52 years of car ownership and wouldn’t consider buying another I.C.E. vehicle. GM‘s CEO is currently on the right track by designing and engineering some nice looking EVs in their current Model lineup with the advantage of local sales and service………over Tesla‘s direct to consumer/mobile service business model.

 

[dbacksfan81]

JMO, GM's bigger issue was they were producing 7 different car and truck divisions, Chevy/Pontiac/Oldsmobile/Buick/Cadillac/Saturn/GMC as well as globally Holden/Opel/Isuzu/Vauxhaul, that was the bread and butter of their bottom line and the old guard management and the bean counters were not impressed.

Musk and Tesla had the advantage of being single focused on an electric vehicle and charging network and smartly leveraged higher priced models in the beginning to help finance the charging network and more R&D on newer models.