It’s taken decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop
but this is to be the world’s first mass produced electric car.
It’s time to get the electric vehicles out of the lab,
into the showroom and onto the road.
EV1 How an electric car dream was crushed
Two days out of three Los Angeles sits under a canopy of smog.
I was a student at Cal Tech in the sixties and there are days when the
smog was so bad that people would have tears coming down their face
even though they were happy. I got to thinking,
what can be the technical solutions? This was the original 'Electrospirit'
proposal in 1985 that was not funded.
Although that proposal was unsuccessful in 1987, General Motors asked the company to help them win a race.
It made its name at the
end of last year by winning the World Solar Challenge Race across Australia.
The GM Sunraycer was a revolutionary design for a solar powered vehicle
and the fact that the Sunraycer did so well,
it won the race by a day and a half. We were able to go back and say,
'OK, we want to work with you, General Motors.' So that we could have the second proposal, known as the Impact proposal.
The 'Impact' concept car.
The idea was that a passenger vehicle could be built,
which would not only have utility but would be fun to drive.
We came to the conclusion that it would be possible
to do zero to 60 miles an hour in eight seconds, which was unheard of, for an electric vehicle.
I had had the dream about driving something like this,
so I got in, pushed the button for forward and stepped on the accelerator all the way.
The acceleration was incredible.
It was a very exciting moment for me seeing the engineering, now come alive.
California has the toughest air quality standards anywhere, but LA cannot meet them.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) became aware of the car...
and introduced a mandate that 2% of cars sold must be zero-emission.
I had a meeting with CARB. I did not mention the name General Motors,
I just said a large car company. They assumed it was Ford. So, I said, ‘no bigger’.
People have a concept of electric vehicles that they are essentially golf carts
and they're not going to be viable. What GM proved with the Impact is that if you go
about it right, it could be made a viable product.
The building of the Impact
motivated the ZEV mandate, then with the ZEV mandate in place,
General Motors was basically forced to build an electric car
and they took what they had with the Impact and made the EV1.
The Electric car is here.
Drivers could lease the EV1 for $500 a month.
This vehicle captured, not only the imagination of people who drove it, but also the imagination of engineers, who thought
OK, if it's this good now, think what I can maybe add to make it even better.
The EV1 effort cost General Motors a billion dollars.
There were people that wanted to shut it down as soon as possible.
It's difficult when you're a car company making gasoline cars
to talk about the advantages of electric cars being emission free
because you're having to imply that the rest of your product line
does not meet that requirement.
They concluded that the EV1 was not going to be profitable.
In 2004 almost all EV1s were recalled and crushed.
As the electric cars were being taken away from their owners, there was a mock funeral in Hollywood.
I believe that as a country we’re taking a wrong turn.
I hope we will realise that and get back on the highway of progress.
The crushing of the EV1 and more broadly the bringing to the end of
that electric vehicle era set us back years in the automotive fight
to get vehicles that would be free of carbon emissions.
Had we not done that, had in fact, the spirit been one of saying
“Yes, we're losing money on this, but we have a vision”,
my guess is that General Motors would be ahead of where Tesla is right now,
had that been the case.