Quote Originally Posted by VehiGAZ
OK, Joe, you have a point regarding RE, but the amount of electricity running through the grid that was produced by RE sources is probably less than 1%, so I'll discount my original argument by that much too - the rest is still fossil-fuel-derived electricity.
It is today. It is not necessarily tomorrow. With conventional vehicles it is and always will be oil. The major benefit of electric vehicles (same thing applies to hydrogen or any other non-petroleum powered vehicle) is centralized energy production.

Even today with oil/coal/gas powered electrical plants, the energy extraction efficiencies are much higher at the plant than they are in your car (up to 60% for natural gas vs up to 40% for diesel engines, significantly less for gasoline engines). They also (can) have better pollution controls. (I say "can" because we have this foolish policy of grandfathering in the dirtiest plants in the USA and exempting them from pollution control upgrades, but that's not the case in all countries).

But beyond simply upgrading the pollution controls, having centralized energy production means we can swap out one form of production for another. Already the USA produces 20% of our electricity from nukes, while France does 80% of their electricity from nukes - electric cars already make use of that. It's a lot easier to upgrade a couple of hundred power plants than it is to do a couple of hundred million cars.


As for the costs of the EV1? About $80K including R&D and they leased for about half that. The problem with cancelling the line because the costs were too high is that R&D costs were already sunk. Cancelling the line didn't get those back, meanwhile battery technology continues to be improved by many other sources. So GM would have been able to ride that development curve and realize reductions in manufacturing costs "for free." Additionally, at the time the cost of the electricity was between 1/3rd and 1/2 the cost for the equivalent amount of gasoline, a ratio that's only improved in recent years - although GM probably can't be blamed for not knowing that.

Since demand for the car far exceeded supply (waiting lists were full up, despite GM's claim of a lack of demand) they could probably have rejiggered the numbers to come out a lot better than they were. As a SWAG I bet the base lease price could have gone to at least $60K and they would have still had enough demand for the 200 vehicles per year that they were producing. Combine that with better and cheaper batteries and they are probably around the break-even point sans the already spent R&D.

Last and perhaps least with GM averaging losses of around $1B per quarter recently, losses due to EV1 were a teeny-tiny drop in the bucket. That $1B/qtr didn't do squat for improving the baseline technology in the market for automobiiles while the EV1 as an extended prototype had lots of potential for developing the EV2, EV3, etc that may easily have been cost effective. As tax-payers we gave GM over $1B in pork to support the EV1 development, I consider GM to have had a moral obligation to continue with the EV line. But I blame our government for handing out the pork apparently without a hard contract to keep GM from bailing. (I say apparently because I am entirely willing to believe that such a contract was signed back when the program started, but our pork stuffers just didn't have the guts to enforce it in 2003 because I am cynical that way).