Roadside Assistant Help » Why does GM get rid of an electric car in California, where they helped the air?

1) They’re in bed with the oil companies.
2) It’s cheaper and easier for them to sue the govt to force them to roll back emissions standards than it is to produce and sell electric cars.
3) They care about one thing and one thing only: PROFIT.

- 11 March 2010 at 1:52 pm

pro-diesel said:

They are coming back I believe. At the time Electric cars just were not pratical. They very well may be in with the oil companies or others. They have bought into the ethanol hoax

- 11 March 2010 at 2:39 pm

C7S said:

No one bought them so there was no point in making them.

- 11 March 2010 at 3:12 pm

fordgtman1992 said:

That is wierd the movie doesn’t say, but who knows, GM is wierd

- 11 March 2010 at 3:44 pm

Wayne said:

The direction that the State of Califonia wanted the research to go was into reasonable family cars that were both electric and gasoline/diesel powered hybrids.

All electric required an emmense interstructure of uniform charging stations to be built. Just didn’t meet the requirements.

- 11 March 2010 at 4:01 pm

Randy C said:

GM got rid of the EV1 because they were afraid they were going to loose money. Also it conflicted with the 100 year old business model. They came up with a myriad of excuses, “we could only LEASE 850″, (they were never for sale) “nobody wanted the car”, (not a single car sat in the showroom for more than a week) etc.

The official reason was “since we are no longer making parts to keep the EV1 safely on the road we had to destroy them”. Which sounds lame at best and totally ludicrous in the least. By that logic every 1966 Corvette must be rounded up and destroyed because there is no GM factory making so much as a brake shoe (did it have disk brakes?) for the 66 Corvette.

GM sabotaged the EV1 program from the start. They deliberately only made a few token cars, in an inefficient manner, to keep CARB off their back. The way the EV1 was built: you place the chassis on a stand, 2 guys pull up a cart full of parts. After mounting the parts they go get another cart full. There was no assembly line, no robots, no single task work station etc. When you build cars this way they are going to be expensive. This is how they build Bentley, Rolls Royce and Ferrari cars.

The auto makers lied to CARB tricking them into cutting the mandate. They made it difficult and expensive to get the car charged, the charger cost over $2000 plus at least $1000 to install. GM would only lease the car not sell it so that they had a way to get the cars off of the road etc. Not things you would do if you really wanted to sell any kind of cars.

- 11 March 2010 at 5:01 pm