electric car, was: <VV> em corvair audi (No corvair content)

[airvair]

In Automotive News just a while ago, one of the inside engineers who had
worked on the EV-1 stated in an article on GM's electric car effort that
no one in GM had intentionally planned for the project to fail. Rather
quite the opposite, according to him. Personally I find that a little
hard to believe, despite his quite plausable reasoning (among other
factors) that no company would invest that much money in something they
wanted to fail.

My thoughts are that maybe GM's top brass had BLINDLY created the
conditions that made it's failure a certainty. One factor is the
decision to limit its distribution area. Second is the fact that it was
a "lease" that in truth was only a rental agreement. (A lease by
definition is "rent with the option to buy," whereas GM didn't allow any
purchase - hence it was merely a rental.) Third was the fact that the
car was only a two-seater. Historically two-seaters have a limited
market, despite the fact that a majority of cars only typically carry
two passengers at most at any one time. Had they made it a four-seater,
it would have had a much broader market, not to mention looking better.
(GM displayed a series of five EV-1 bodied cars with various alternative
drive trains at the Detroit Auto Show one year, and all of them were
stretched 4-seater versions. Really nice looking, IMO.) It also would
have allowed for a longer, larger battery pack, thus extending its range
(something that was a sore spot from the get-go.)

BOTTOM LINE: All these factors combined into assuring the project's
ultimate failure. Why GM couldn't see them is beyond me.

-Mark

P.S. And why do you think they changed the name from Impact to EV-1?
Even they could see that that name would be a handicap in the
marketplace. But for a "show" vehicle, they no doubt wanted it to make
an "impact," hence the name. Perfectly acceptable under those
circumstances.

Tony Underwood wrote:
> 
> All the while, Toyota has step-by-step done things to insure their
> continuing success at the expense of GM, up to and including running
> a promising low/zero emissions vehicle (EV1) out of business by
> having the Japanese government subsidize 70% of the costs of the
> Prius so as to make it affordable by US Amurikins while the EV1 of
> course was no longer practical to produce since the buyers would
> flock to buy that cheaper Prius that you didn't have to recharge.
> 
> Does anybody believe that if the Prius hadn't been heavily
> subsidized, that GM would have dropped the EV1?    And what the HELL
> was GM thinking when they first called this electric hotrod "Impact"?
>