26 Facts About EV1

General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999.

EV1 was made available through limited lease-only agreements, initially to residents of the cities of Los Angeles, California, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

EV1 lessees were officially participants in a "real-world engineering evaluation" and market study into the feasibility of producing and marketing a commuter electric vehicle in select U S markets undertaken by GM's Advanced Technology Vehicles group.

The EV1 program was discontinued in 2002, and all cars on the road were taken back by the company, under the terms of the lease.

EV1's discontinuation remains controversial, with electric car enthusiasts, environmental interest groups and former EV1 lessees accusing GM of self-sabotaging its electric car program to avoid potential losses in spare parts sales, while blaming the oil industry for conspiring to keep electric cars off the road.

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The EV1 would be the first GM car in history to wear a "General Motors" nameplate, instead of one of GM's marques.

Some anti-taxation groups were against the exemptions and tax credits that EV1 lessees received, which they said constituted government-subsidized motoring for affluent professionals.

Some EV1 enthusiasts believed that GM was demonstrating ambivalence towards promotion of the EV1 after its initial release.

At least 58 EV1 drivers sent letters and deposit checks to GM, requesting lease extensions at no risk or cost to the automaker.

Critics further charged that when CARB, in response to the EV1, mandated that electric vehicles make up a certain percentage of all automakers' sales, GM came to fear that the EV1 might encourage unwanted regulation in other states.

At the 2000 hearings, GM claimed that consumers were simply not showing sufficient interest in the EV1 to meet the sales requirements called for by CARB mandates.

In GM's view, the EV1 was not a failure, but the program was doomed when the expected breakthroughs in battery technology did not take place within the anticipated timeline, citing the lack of availability of the NiMH-technology battery packs, developed by Energy Conversion Devices of Michigan, until late in the production cycle.

In 2019 a red EV1 was found inside a multistorey car park in Atlanta in a "barn find" state.

In 2022, an EV1 that had been sent out to Australia for evaluation was donated to the National Motor Museum, Birdwood, South Australia.

Decades before the release of the Impact and the EV1 had seen little in the way of development on the electric car front.

In contrast to these cars, the EV1 was designed from the ground up to be an electric vehicle.

The EV1 program was initially administered by a GM engineer named Kenneth Baker, who had been the lead on the Electrovette program in the 1970s.

EV1 was not only used to showcase the electric powertrain, but premiered a number of features and technologies that would later find their way onto more common GM models and other manufacturers' cars.

The EV1 was among the first production vehicles to utilize aluminum in the construction of the frame.

EV1 was a subcompact car, with a 2-door coupe body style.

EV1 charged using the Magne Charge inductive charging paddle produced by the General Motors subsidiary Delco Electronics.

The EV1 had no analog dials, and all instrumentation readouts were displayed in a single thin curved strip mounted high on the dashboard, just underneath the windshield.

At the time of release, the lead–acid battery-equipped EV1 was the only electric car produced which met all of the United States Department of Energy's EV America performance goals.

The EV1 was produced for the consumer market, and many lessees found driving an EV1 to be a favorable experience.

Some analysts have suggested that it is inappropriate to compare the EV1 with existing gasoline powered commuter cars, since the EV1 was, in effect, a completely new product category that had no equivalent vehicles against which it might be judged.

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GM responded to the film's claims, laying out several reasons why the EV1 was not commercially viable at the time and that the company had issues finding parts for the car.