Just make sure the lawyers don't get a chance to rewrite history. I think this is mostly an attempt to wash the shame away from what was clearly technology ahead of it's time. They chose poorly and Elon Musk would be an unknown millionaire today if GM decided to continue development of the EV1.
This statement doesn’t really seem supported by facts. Battery technology just wasn’t able to make this car for the mass market 25 years ago. GM continuing to keep this very low-volume car in the showrooms for 15 more years at an unattractive price point would not have changed anything. Even if GM had produced a car like the Model S around the same time that Tesla did in our timeline, that would not have guaranteed them anything, nor would it have constrained Tesla’s founders from taking the risk to start that company and succeeding.
That's an old argument. The Prius hybrid was already running around with the same battery technology. They could have shifted. They could have pivoted. They could have done a very low volume production. The car was killed.
It's the correct argument. Bob Lutz deals with it in one of his books.
The EV1 was a evaluation exercise/hedge against regulation; the impetus was a lunatic assertion in 1990 by the CA gov't: they wanted 10% of cars sold in the state by 2000 to be electric. Nobody outside of Sacramento thought this would be doable, but it was an excuse to do some useful R&D, as well as to demonstrate to lawmakers the difficulties involved.
As for the Prius-the Gen I Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive cost $380 million in 1990s dollars for R&D. Anybody at GM trying to spend that kind of money on an experimental(!) powertrain for a low-volume(!!) economy(!!!) car would've been fired. At Toyota, Shoichiro Toyoda was supportive of such an idea, despite the limited opportunity for near-term profit; and if you have that last name at that company, nobody's gonna fire you.
How much do you think an electric S-10 cleared in terms of net profit, vs. a gas S10? Even before factoring in the development costs for the electric powertrain.
If you had to defend it to a roomful of the guys who would be writing checks for the program (and who, incidentally, decide what your annual bonus will be...) what would that sound like?
I don't believe they actually sold many of those, they had the same lease-only issue as the ev1, with the exception of a few private (ie government) owners...
If they hadn't lobbied to make small cars more expensive because the margins were lower, they could have built a model that was capable of being EV or gasoline, to get economy of scale for most of the vehicle. Well, worked with Daewoo to make a nicer version of the Chevy Aveo which could be a 4-seater gasoline car or 2-seater EV... Well, problem with that idea is the EV-1 was only popular with Hollywood types because it was a statement vehicle, so everybody knew what you were doing. I guess the dual-purpose vehicle would not.
