GM discontinued production of the EV1 because they built about 1000 units the four years they were produced. If California and Arizona had shown more interest, they may have continued. GM commissioned a study that showed cars like the EV1 weren’t acceptable to large enough population segment to continue production. Toyota was a partner in that study. There was a counter-study that showed electric vehicles were indeed viable, but only if the range was doubled. GM doubled the range eventually, and the Bolt is the first electric to meet that range at a reasonable (sort of) price.
The EV1s were likely called in off lease because GM has a habit of not letting experimental vehicles go for sale. A very few were sold, but for the most part, they remain in GMs hands or they were destroyed. A few EV1s are still around in museums but without running power plants.
The second generation EV1 switched to NiMH batteries with a range of 140 miles. I applaud GM for designing and building such a vehicle. Wish they didn’t stop. Funny how they NOW think the technology is viable.
Maybe because it is now viable but wasn’t then? The increase in range didn’t seem to increase leases substantially, despite increasing the geopgraphic areas they were leased in. They tried, and it didn’t seem to make sense to continue in the early 2000s. Maybe now is different. GM, and others, certainly seem to think so.
The advent of Lithium Ion battery technology has been instrumental in the viability of the electric car. Battery technology has always been the critical factor and remains so today…
I am curious as to why Tesla and so many other automobile companies seem obsessed with building off the charts vehicles at astronomical prices. How can they sell enough vehicles to be profitable? And as Tesla sells their latest Hyperbolemobile huge markets for commercial applications of regenerative electromotive systems on trucks is ignored.
It wasn’t meant to be profitable. I was a design concept to showcase the world that it can be done. The whole idea behind making their first vehicle a sports vehicle with insane 0-60 was to make a statement. It got them noticed. This is nothing new in the tech field. Many times companies will build a product for this purpose. This was taken to the extreme. Nice when you’re a billionaire and can afford to do it.
Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the 70’s and were in full use in many tech sectors by the 80’s. GM didn’t want to put the research into applying that technology to automotive. From their prospective it was too risky. Musk saw it differently.
It’s been a long time since I was well-versed in the subject, but I recall that there was some shenanigans surrounding the battery patents for electric cars back then. Basically oil companies bought the patents and then sat on them so that, with that battery technology, electric cars couldn’t be developed commercially without lawsuits.
Now the patents have expired, but it doesn’t matter because they’re using different battery technology anyway.
As with most luxury things, it doesn’t generally cost much more to doll up something into “luxury.” It costs just a little bit more to build a luxury apartment building than it does to build an economy apartment building, but you can charge 3 times as much which is one of the reasons there’s a low income housing crisis - nobody in his right mind is going to pay almost as much to build in order to only be able to charge 1/3 as much in rent.
Same thing with cars. Look at the difference between Hyundai and Acura. One is luxury, the other’s economy. Well, my wife’s Hyundai has a nav system, XM radio, bluetooth phone and music, keyless entry, remote start, power windows, sunroof, and a bunch of other doodads. My Acura has most of that stuff (hers is newer than mine) but cost twice as much new. Why? Because the overall feel is nicer. But it didn’t cost Honda twice as much to put the nicer materials in that thing.
Teslas are expensive because batteries are expensive. It’d be pretty hard to get a guy to spend 100 grand on an electric Ford Festiva. How do we know? Because that’s basically what the Tango was - a stupid-fast compact electric crap-box that cost $100 grand. They didn’t even sell 20 of 'em.
Throw in some leather and an air suspension and make it bigger and get it to look like a Maserati, all of which will cost you maybe 5 grand and you can get him to spend $40,000 more.
In 1980, the American physicist Professor John Goodenough invented a new type of lithium battery in which the lithium (Li) could migrate through the battery from one electrode to the other as a Li+ ion
I happened to be designing things back then and NiCAD and later NiMH were the reigning technologies. GM didn’t want to risk using NiMH so they opted for LA flooded cells. That was in the late 90s.
Tesla didn’t make their first car until 2008. Back in the 1980-1990s, no one would have considered powering a drill from a Li-iON battery let alone a car…
1973 – Adam Heller Proposes the lithium thionyl chloride battery, still used in implanted medical devices and in defense systems where greater than a 20-year shelf life, high energy density, or extreme operating temperatures are encountered.[32]
1977 – Samar Basu demonstrated electrochemical intercalation of lithium in graphite at the University of Pennsylvania.[33][34] This led to the development of a workable lithium intercalated graphite electrode at Bell Labs (LiC
6)[35] to provide an alternative to the lithium metal electrode battery.
1979 – Working in separate groups, at Stanford University Ned A. Godshall et al.,[36][37][38] and the following year in 1980 at Oxford University, England, John Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima, both demonstrated a rechargeable lithium cell with voltage in the 4 V range using lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO
2) as the positive electrode and lithium metal as the negative electrode.[39][40] This innovation provided the positive electrode material that made lithium batteries commercially possible. LiCoO
2 is a stable positive electrode material which acts as a donor of lithium ions, which means that it can be used with a negative electrode material other than lithium metal.[citation needed] By enabling the use of stable and easy-to-handle negative electrode materials, LiCoO
2 opened a whole new range of possibilities for novel rechargeable battery systems. Godshall et al. further identified in 1979, along with LiCoO2, the similar value of ternary compound lithium-transition metal-oxides such as the spinel LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, LiMnO2, LiFeO2, LiFe5O8, and LiFe5O4 (and later lithium-copper-oxide and lithium-nickel-oxide cathode materials in 1985)[41][41]
Nikolai Tesla, the namesake of the company, was a brilliant man who unfortunately ultimately died penniless. Given the rate at which Tesla is hemorrhaging money these days, I have to wonder if history will note that they were all-too-aptly named…
Yep his story was told in the book “The Men that Made America”. It’s been awhile since I read it but all through history people have had better ideas but fail to get them adopted for various reasons. There are a lot of things that need to be in place to get a better idea adopted. Was Ford really a better idea or was it the mass production and marketing? Nothing against his idea but some of us think Tesla just doesn’t have all his ducks lined up for success. Maybe that’s fine with him and his investors but may not make him well known in history.
He chased a pipe dream trying to transmit electric power without wires. However, it was Marconi who figured out that the technology he created in his attempt to transmit power wirelessly was better suited for wireless communication and so Marconi is known as the father of radio.
Sometimes invention is figuring out what something is good for.
You seem to be confusing research programs in universities with commercialized technology. They key words university, proposes, demonstrates- those should be clues to you that it’s not anywhere near ready for commercialization and use in products outside of a university lab experiment…
Taken out of context, it’s even worse. They were lab novelties. No person designing a car would have considered such a thing during that time. We didn’t even consider it for powering simple electronic devices. NiCAD and later NiMH was the only real choice.
But to capture the full text-
Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the 70’s and were in full use in many tech sectors by the 80’s
But even in the 90’s my original post holds up against the argument of GM NOT using Lithium batteries since the EV-1 was designed and produced from 1996 - 1999.