General Motors' Bob Lutz Says There'll Be No Resurrecting the EV1
By Scott Doggett July 2, 2008
A vociferous reader of the Los Angeles Times
wrote a letter to its editor and sent a copy to Bob Lutz, General Motors' vice chairman of global product development.
The gist of the letter: GM, after losing $39 billion last year and with its stock at a three-decade low, could save itself by bringing back a 10-year-old, two-seat, plug-in electric car: the EV1.
Introduced in 1996, the zero-emissions EV1 electric cars were available in California and Arizona for lease only. They were discontinued after 1999 and, with a few exceptions, subsequently destroyed by GM. The car's discontinuation was and remains a controversial topic.
"There is one option GM has not considered, which would turn things around, both in image and in reality," the reader wrote. "GM could resume production of the 1999 EV1, using Panasonic lead-acid batteries."
Furthermore, he wrote, GM's plans to produce a four-seat extended-range electric car called the Volt, set for release in 2010, "depends on lithium batteries which don't yet exist."
Lutz took the bait and ran with it. For all of us who dream of an eventual return of the first modern production electric vehicle, "Maximum Bob" has some rather dreadful news.
"The EV will not meet any current safety laws. Putting a version into production that meets regulations would put us out to '11 or '12. They cost us well over $80,000 to produce, and, being a two-seater, we could only sell 800 in four years. We lost over one billion dollars on that experiment," he wrote.
"I don't know why you insist that lithium-ion doesn't exist. We are getting packs from our suppliers, they test well in both hot and cold, they store the energy as claimed, we are fast-cycling them to make sure they last, we are doing high-temp, high-load testing with the cooling system shut down and are experiencing no thermal problems. Trust me, the battery will not delay the car."
We'll see.
Scott Doggett, Contributor
LEAVE A COMMENT