The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? tells the story of the EV-1, an early battery electric vehicle (EV) which “ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry.” Although General Motors (GM), the car’s manufacturer, is criticized for a “lack of corporate wisdom” for crushing the fleet of EV1s, which were never offered for sale and only available on lease, the real villains of the piece are the “big oil” companies that, it is claimed, “control the marketplace, [and] have a strong incentive for discouraging alternatives.”

EV1: Suppressed solution

The EV1 enthusiast group (www.ev1.org) believes that in “Crushing the EV1, GM crushed itself.” The website cites the issues raised by GM of restricted range, liability, lack of infrastructure for charging, and battery and manufacturing costs, and claims that “none of the EV1 lessees complained about the range” and that if Toyota saw no issue with liability in selling the RAV4-EV, then there should have been no issue for GM either.

The enthusiasts' site also focuses on the ability to take advantage of off-peak overnight electricity, suggesting that this, combined with photovoltaic (PV) rooftop solar systems, could enable “electric companies to amortize expensive generators over more hours of operation, converting current gasoline consumption to clean, available—and often cost-free—electric power.” The cheaper of the two batteries used for the EV1, the PSB EV-EC1260 lead batteries, they claim cost “no more than $4,800,” and “the rest of the EV1 is just electronics and bent metal.”

EV1: Expensive experiment

Other commentators take a more balanced view. Ron Cogan, writing for www.greencar.com and himself an EV1 lessee, is less dismissive of the problems facing GM. He comments that at the time, Roger Smith, Chairman and CEO of GM, announced that GM would make an electric car, “much of the technology did not yet exist to transform the concept car into reality.” He suggests the $33,995 price tag assigned to the car was “artificially low,” and that “its undisclosed production cost was much, much higher.” The batteries alone, he suggests, may have cost between $20,000 and $30,000 per unit, based on “back-channel discussions with those involved in these programs.”

The decision to lease rather than sell the cars, he adds, was necessary because of “GM's need to maintain ultimate ownership over highly advanced and extremely expensive vehicles, using all-new technology, that were being marketed in a deliberate way to feel out the market.” For Cogan, although the EV1 was a “joy to drive,” that “featured the lowest coefficient of drag of any production vehicle,” and whose cockpit “was reminiscent of what one would expect in a jet fighter,” he concedes that at the time there was no business case “for continuing the manufacturing and sales of its EV1 because of high production costs.”

EV1: Dubious diversion?

Not all environmentalists were as enamored with the EV1, or the concept of electric cars. Richard Register, writing for Culture Change in 1998, challenged the assumption that the electricity generated to power EVs would in fact be cleaner than gas. Taking a critical look at the assumption that using off-peak overnight power would mean that there would be no increase in energy consumption from the grid, he pointed out that a higher overnight draw on the grid would mean, “more water pouring over the dams, or burning more oil, gas, coal or nuclear fuel, more power lines from wind farms.” Furthermore, he suggests that the extra drain would wear our all the power plants and turbines "twice as fast.”

A new wave of EVs

Either way, the EV1 and its plug-in competitors quietly faded from the scene to be replaced with hybrid alternatives and, until recently hybrid cars like the Prius appeared to be the only viable green option. Now, however with a rash of electric cars due to come to market in 2011 or 2012, including the BMW Megacity, the BYD E6, which has the backing and investment of Warren Buffett, the Coda Electric Sedan, Ford Focus EV, and Nissan Leaf, many of which will run on lithium ion batteries, the EVs time may be about to come.

There are still price and range issues, and the EV still has its critics. Gerard Wynn, writing for Reuters, quotes Peter Wells, of Cardiff University's Center for Automotive Industry Research, as doubting the viability of the EV market. “The electric vehicle sector certainly has momentum,” Wells says, “but it's questionable whether it has the legs for the longer term, at least at the moment, and whether it has enough scale.”

Tom Moloughney, a field tester for the BMW Mini E electric car, says that issues of “range anxiety” are overestimated. In reality, he says, “once you've lived with an electric car for a little while, you know how far it can go and you don't really think about it much at all.”

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