25 Years of Drive: The world’s first electric vehicle goes on sale

General Motors opens the order books for the world’s first series production electric vehicle.

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Story originally published 4 August, 1996.

The world’s first modern electric car is about to go on sale in four California and Arizona cities at shocking prices.

The General Motors EV1, a fifth-generation version of the 1990 Impact show car, will sell for $44,000, or roughly three times the price of an equivalent petrol-powered model. To counter the problem, GM will lease the EV1 to customers through 25 of its Saturn brand dealerships in San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson.

State and Federal rebates and energy tax credits will be offered to buyers, reducing the translation price on which the monthly lease payment is based to about $35,000.

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The EV1 is the first car to be badged and sold as a General Motors model. Detroit’s Free Press newspaper estimates development costs for the EV1 at $440 million. The compact two-seater coupe is the first electric car offered by a major manufacturer since the early 1900s.

The stiff price and restricted range of the EV1 mean many of the first customers are expected to be government utilities and delivery businesses that cover the same route day after day.

GM believes private buyers who choose the EV1 will probably use it as a second car for commuting, shopping trips and other travel within safe range of still-scarce public charging stations.

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The EV1 will travel between 105km and 150km on a single charge under normal driving conditions and take between three hours for a quick top-up and 15 hours for a deep-cycle recharge. Times also depend on the capacity of the electrical outlet.

Battery technology is the Achilles heel of the electric car. The battery pack on the EV1 weighs 523kg, more than a third of the EV1’s weight, yet gives the car much the same driving range as five kilograms of petrol or diesel.

Cracking this energy density problem is the holy grail of motoring, with the US Big Three and Government forming a joint venture to try to crack the problem.

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In Japan, car-makers and consumer electronics companies are likewise engaged as the technology would be equally beneficial to mobile phones, laptop computers or other battery-powered devices.

How many EV1s will it sell? GM isn’t saying.

So, what happened next?

The EV1 remained in production from 1996-99. General Motors refused to sell the EV1 outright. Instead, customers leased the futuristic electric vehicle directly from GM at US$399 per month over a period of three years.

It’s estimated a smidge over 1100 EV1s rolled off the production line, the last in 1999. By then, early-build EV1s were being handed back to GM, the US giant refusing to hand over ownership to its lessees.

Instead, General Motors, under the teams of its lease agreement, repossessed its electric vehicles, before crushing them, citing liability risks to both owners and engineers working on the then-nascent battery technology. Additionally, GM was said to be concerned about its proprietary technology falling into the hands of rival manufacturers.

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Around 40 examples survive today, almost all in museums. None are functional, General Motors ‘bricking’ the remaining examples, rendering them undrivable.

However, rumours abound of a couple of complete and working examples remaining in circulation with the only confirmed EV1 remaining in private hands belonging to film director Francis Ford Coppola. The multiple Academy Award winning director told TV host and car nut Jay Leno in 2014 that he hid his EV1 away from the GM round-up crew in 2003.

Another example turned up in an Atlanta garage in 2019 but little is known about it or its subsequent fate.

In all GM invested around US$1 billion in the EV1, a commercial disaster by any measure. Had the U.S. giant persisted in developing the EV1, it would have been at least a decade ahead of the electric vehicle game. Also, we might never have heard of Elon Musk or Tesla. Musk claimed in 2017 he started Tesla in response to GM’s decision to abandon its electric vehicle program.

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