Smithsonian Kills the Electric Car
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 06.19.06
After having the chance to see major environmental issues on the big screen in An Inconvenient Truth, moviegoers will have another chance to see relevant subject matter in action with Who Killed the Electric Car?, which will open at the end of this month (see THTV sneak peek of Who Killed and our interview with Paul Scott). The documentary tells the story of the now legendary EV1, a work of engineering genius and the only mass produced electric vehicle to (yet) grace our roads. It just got harder, however, to actually see the famous car in person, even behind a velvet rope. After revoking and destroying their EV1s, General Motors gave a handful of them to museums as historical pieces. Now, the only fully intact EV1 on display has been removed from view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to make room for a robotic VW Touareg designed by Stanford University, what the Washington Post called a “high-tech SUV.”
This has made for suspicious news as it comes just before the opening of the documentary (which is critical of GM, among others), and doubly so because GM is one of the museum’s largest financial supporters. The hall in which the EV1 sat is, in fact, named after GM, the company that shelled out $10 million in 2001 to help pay for its construction. When asked in 2001 if General Motors would have any say in the exhibits shown in the hall, museum director Spencer Crew told the New York Times, “Absolutely not.” A spokeswoman for the Museum told TreeHugger that the EV1 had originally only been intended to be on display for only a few months when it was went up in March, 2005, and that GM did not weigh in on the decision. The spokeswoman reiterated that museum sponsors do not influence exhibits, but said that the Smithsonian does not have plans to display the car further.
Chris Paine, director of Who Killed the Electric Car?, told TreeHugger, “If the Smithsonian is pulling the EV1 and replacing it with an SUV they
should put that EV1 back where it belongs: On the Road. SUVs are the
dinosaur and electric cars are the promise. Putting the EV1 into "storage"
as they've said is just so wrong.”
(The EV1 pictured above, as seen on display at the Smithsonian, was leased to Phil Karn, who had to return the leased car to GM in 2000. He later matched the VIN number and discovered where his beloved vehicle had gone.)
(This from the original owner’s manual of the EV1. Image credit: National Museum of American History)
Interested in electric cars? Check out: 17 Electric Cars You Must Know About
well, this SUV drove more than 100 miles through the desert - without a driver. A driverless vehicle is not a dinosaur but indeed a technolgy of the future. Also, a sturdy SUV is actually a good choice in cases where you have a very bad driver (the computer) and many miles of dirt tracks ...
(I still think that there should be space for both cars ..)
Who killed the electric car?
All of the people who didn't buy one! It's not reasonable to expect GM to continue losing money indefinately. Besides, the electric car is not dead, one maker, GM, quit making them. The market place is wide open for someone else to sell them. It's not like trying to reestablish public tranportation after it was dismantled. Who killed public transportation? All the people who quit using it!
There is an ev-1 still on display at the crawford auto museum in Clevland:
http://www.wrhs.org/crawford/template.asp?id=99
Economic factors certainly play a role, but ideological factors and vision are also important.
If Toyota had stopped investing in hybrids in the mid 90s because gas was cheap, the early cars were too pricey and they expected low volumes, they'd never have gotten anywhere. All new techs start out as low volume and expensive. If you stop at that point, of course you'll never get anywhere.
As for GM, they are losing money on many of their regular cars, so it's not like losing money is such an aberration for them. I'm sure that right now they wish they had kept pushing and developing the technology, at least as a way to regain some credibility and have something ready in a few years when demand increases.
MGR,
The Prius is a good seller. The GM EV was a sales dud.
GM simply quit making this car. It doesn't mean they can't reenter this market at some future date. They didn't throw away the technology. As a matter of fact, they have more experience with electric vehicles than anyone. I have a feeling that if it were still available it still wouldn't set sales records. Look at the Honda hybrid that was recently discontinued and the slow sales of the Ford Escape Hybrid.
I think before they ever start to manufacture electric cars again, they have to first create recyclable or disposable batteries. I bet some chemists at Harvard and MIT could develop plant based batteries in about a decade (they already are doing that with photovoltaic lenses). Because the biggest problem with hybrids and electric vehicles is that their batteries can't be disposed of safely, and having battery acid leak into the ground water totally defeats having the hybrid in the first place.
--
editor note: Batteries are already recycled. Please see this.
The makers of this movie seized upon a golden opportunity, riding on the coat tails of An Inconvenient Truth. I'm afraid they wouldn't find the truth to be very convenient. I call people like that, Econistas.
Feed the frenzy to blame someone else and not take any responsibility. Brilliant!
--
editor note: Are you suggesting that they were able to put together a movie fast enough to "ride the coat tails" of A.I.T., or that years ago they foresaw that an Al Gore slide presentation would be this popular and mediatized?
I find it odd that the Smithsonian doesn't give a valid reason for removing the EV1 from display.
They could certainly come up with better deception than laughably potesting their impartiality and lamely claiming "it wasn't supposed to be on display that long".
While I live in a city and use mass transit, my friends in the suburbs are very familiar with the EV1 since they leased them. It was a very popular car, early adopted by fellow environmentalists and headturning to the hoi polloi. To say that the cars were economically unfeasible is fallacious. The most promising seed will fail to grow if you remove its resources. And why did that happen? Oil.
SUV's are the automotive equivalent of crack. Like a White Knight for Detroit, they promised big margins, big aftermarket in costly maintenance and repairs, and great oil consumption. Only minor retooling of their production lines was necessary. Rather than addressing long standing problems in the American automotive industry, attacking 1) inefficiency, and 2) unreliability, they opted for a quick fix. They marketed the behemoths toward mothers as a safe haven for children, a rugged terrain vehicle for the testosterone crowd. Meanwhile, NHTSA buried reports on rollovers and the extremely high death rates of SUVs. Consumer Reports noted that fender benders in even 5mph collisions produced staggering repair bills relative to sedans.
How can a nation have the wool pulled over its collective eyes? Oil.
Like a drug dealer, samples are given cheaply. Dependency ensues. And this is a nation mainlining oil like no other.
In what other Democracy does oil have such far reaching ties to all corners of government. Policies are decided like a drug addled addict. Oil companies, the most profitable companies in America are 1) given billions of dollars of tax subsidies, 2) given billions of dollars worth of access to public land without proper licensing fees.
Senate debate is not about conservation, efficiency or civic policies that give long term benefit to the people. Talk is about more drilling. Talk is about ethanol, a fuel source that has a negative net-gain, requiring more oil to produce and transport than it is equivalent to. To add insult to injury, ethanol plants require millions of gallons of water to operate.
To further complicate things, agro-corporations are now receiving and lobbying for millions and millions of dollars more so they can produce this "alternative fuel".
What killed the EV? Economics plain and simple. David was crushed by Goliath.
Toyota also made an electric car and instead of crushing them, they auctioned them off to their leasees. According to a blog by peakoildebunked.com there is a few left on the road in California. Their owners love them.
J.C.,Sr.
It is all about supply and demand. Where there is no demand, it would be foolish to keep on supplying the product.
The museum itself is closing to the public after september for a major renovation. For all we know, the car will be back in 2008 when it reopens.
The Touareg autonomously completed 132 miles in the Mojave Desert. That kind of course calls for an SUV, no matter what. I think both vehicles are very special and both should be displayed, but give credit where credit is due.
http://www.grandchallenge.org/
I'm an electric car owner. Every time I go out, I'm mugged by people asking me about it, and wanting to know where they can get one. Lack of demand didn't kill the EV1. The car was difficult to get, it was never marketed, and GM never made enough of them to satisfy the thousands of people on waiting lists to get one.
George,
Before accusing the makers of the film of being opportunists you should do a little research on the car.
A few quick points:
1. It was not sold, only leased. When GM cancelled the program all cars were recalled without a buyout option.
2. It was only available in CA and AZ.
3. Every EV1 in the program was leased.
So, I am not sure that calling it a "sales dud" is accurate.
From what I have read no one is quite sure why the car was discontinued, thus the film.
I drove the Smithsonian's car here in San Diego from 1998 to 2000. Had GM not taken it back, I'd still be happily driving it. It belongs in my garage, not the Smithsonian's.
It's amazing how persistent the myth is that "no one wanted" EVs when GM leased every EV1 they made available, and despite a long waiting list, refused to make any more than about 1000.
The "no one wanted EVs" myth also doesn't explain why GM insisted on taking back and destroying cars from drivers perfectly willing to pay to continue driving them.
Stored-electric cars will never be the answer. The EV1 was very cool, but it's a dinosaur now.
Batteries are one technology that will never catch up to the demands of something like a car.
Fuel cells and clean alternative fuels are the real answer.
Most stored-electric cars get what, 30 miles of range? Hey, that's great to get me back and forth to work each day, but what am I going to do when I want to take a long weekend drive into the mountains? or to visit my mom 400 miles away? I'm not going to stop every 30 miles, and recharge for 8 hours.
besides, these simply displace pollution like every other electric scheme. The remove the pollution from the tail pipe and move it to the power plant.
Cars like this will forever be museum peices, because they don't make sense on so many different levels.
The internal combustion engine is a remarkable machine, and humans have 100 years of knowledge behind this technology. it doesn't HAVE to run on gasoline. And if it doesn't run on gasoline, it can be a clean form of locomotion and electrical generation.
Diesel engines running on petro-diesel are already cleaner than gasoline (especially with particulate filters installed) engines. And bio-diesel engines are even cleaner.
Even better, diesel engines don't even have to run on fuel oils. Ethanol (if better ways to manufacture it are conceived, which I have faith they will be), hydrogen gas, propane, natural gas, etc.
All clean fuels. And all can be used in fuel cells too.
We don't need a revolution in automobile technology. We need smarter evolutions.
We don't even need to give up oil, just reduce our dependancy and eliminate the use of gasoline.
Chs, you really should do your research before pontificating. The Gen 2 EV1 had 125 miles of range. That was considerably more than I drove in a typical day, so it didn't matter that it took several hours to recharge. I'd take several seconds to plug it in when I got home, and by morning it would be full. I also had a charger at work, but I didn't really need it.
If you drive hundreds of miles every single day, then this car wasn't for you. But for the 95+% of people who drive less than that, EVs are entirely practical.
What did I do when I went on a long trip? Usually I drove to the airport. If I needed to drive long distances, I'd go to the local car rental and get a more suitable vehicle, such as a SUV for desert camping. Made much more sense than driving one every day in San Diego traffic.
You should do an energy and pollution comparison between EVs, fuel cells and gasoline cars. Large power plants are considerably more efficient than car engines, and the electric grid is about 95% efficient. And they can take advantage of hydro, nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind power, none of which produce any CO2.
While EVs do move some pollution to the power plant, the amount per mile is vastly less than for gasoline. I did the numbers myself based on the California generation mix, which is considerably cleaner than the rest of the country. Depending on the pollutant, EVs were anywhere from 95% to 99+% cleaner than gasoline cars.
Fuel cells are far less energy efficient than battery EVs. A typical electrolyzer is about 70% efficient; a typical automotive fuel cell is only 50% efficient (even lead-acid batteries are 85-90% efficient). And who knows what it'll cost to build and operate the hydrogen distribution infrastructure.
And fuel cell vehicles don't even get more range than battery EVs. Hydrogen is notoriously bulky; the car demoed to President Bush in the movie only got 100 miles per tankful, less than the EV1 "dinosaur" you dismiss. Prototype EVs, made since the demise of the EV1 program, have been getting 300 miles per charge on lithium-ion batteries.
Battery EVs are not only practical, they're the only forseeable solution.
Very interesting comment, Phil. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Something that most people also forget is that coal power plants usually can't be turned off or slowed down much during the night, so a lot of power is wasted.
If people recharged electric cars at night, it would actually make them more efficient, at least until the grid is made cleaner.
"and the electric grid is about 95% efficient."
where did you get this figure, phil? i'm fairly certain you're not even in the ballpark. a LOT of energy is lost on it's way from the plant to your home.
to me, whether it's a laptop, a flashlight, an off-grid home, or an ev, batteries are always the achilles heel... a dinosaur technology that needs a lot of development.
one wonders what gm is afraid of what do u think??
MGR,
Coal and nuclear power plants are generally "base load" generators. That means their operating costs are low enough to operate at full power 24 hours/day to meet nighttime power demands; their power is *not* wasted.
Additional daytime demand is met by the more expensive plants, notably those fueled by natural gas. These plants, along with hydroelectric generators, can be more easily varied to meet demand while the base load plants continue to crank along at full power.
In some areas, "pumped storage" hydro plants can absorb excess nighttime generation and produce supplemental power during the day.
When electrical shortages occur, they are invariably the result of transmission, not generation limits. The grid is lightly loaded at night, and since nighttime generation uses the cheapest fuels, it's an ideal time to charge EVs.
Dug, here's a reference that says the average US electricity transmission and distribution loss in 1995 was 7.2%. This includes line and transformer losses.
http://climatetechnology.gov/library/2003/tech-options/tech-options-1-3-2.pdf
My slightly better figure of 5% came from a California-specific source; I'm sure the numbers do vary regionally depending on the distance and technology. They are also consistent with the rate tables from my local utility (SDG&E) which charges slightly less for power delivered at transmission and distribution voltages than at 120/240V because of the smaller losses on their side.
A lot of power is transmitted over very long distances in California as high voltage DC, which tends to be more efficient than AC.
Note that I'm only talking about *transmission* efficiency, not the conversion of fuel into electricity at the power plant. That process is much less efficient -- about 35% -- but is still much better than the same process in a car or truck engine.
Let's do a sanity check on my transmission loss figure.
The Intermountain link is one of two major HVDC transmission links in
California. It runs from northern Utah to Los Angeles, a distance of
785 km. (The other big HVDC link is the Pacific DC Intertie, which
runs from Oregon to LA).
I found the specs. It operates at +/-500 kVDC with a power rating of
1920 MW (roughly the output of both reactors at San Onofre). Each pole
consists of three parallel conductors with an individual resistance of
.0075 ohms per 1,000 ft. The resistance is therefore .0082 ohms per
km, or 6.44 ohms for the entire length, or 12.88 ohms for the round
trip. At full power, each conductor carries 1920 amps. The I^2*R
losses are therefore 1920^2 * 12.88 = 47.5 MW, or about 2.5%.
That's at full power; loss percentages decrease at lower power because
they're proportional to the square of the line current.
This doesn't include transformer or DC/AC conversion losses, but I think
it's sufficient to show that my 5% figure is in the ballpark considering that not all of the power consumed in California has to go this far.
I leased a Ford Th!nkCity electric car, and now I own an electric Toyota RAV4-EV. The myth that there was (and is) no demand for electric cars is automaker propaganda. People in California and Arizona had to be really determined sleuths to even find these cars, and often had to persist over months of obstacles from the car companies to lease them. Even so, every one of them found a home and thousands of people were on waiting lists.
I get 125 miles per charge in my RAV4-EV compact SUV, which is a great regional car. The two-seater Th!nk got me up to 50 miles per charge and was perfect for the city. The money I save from not buying gasoline makes it easy to rent a car when I need to drive a long distance. (Electricity is much cheaper.)
Don't kid yourselves that GM was a lone bad guy. All the major automakers demanded return of their leased EVs after their lawsuit decimated California's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, and all were destroying them. Yes, even Toyota was destroying its commercially-leased RAV4-EVs even while it sold a few individually-leased EVs and broadcast its "green" cred from the gasoline-dependent Prius. Drivers staged multiple street protests to stop the crushing. See www.pluginamerica.com or see the film.
Are plug-in cars the answer for everyone? Of course not. Look at it this way -- for most of my personal transportation, I ride my bike. Yet I know that not everyone can ride a bike. Does that mean no one should make and sell bicycles? Certainly not -- I want the option of a bicycle. I also want the option of a plug-in car.
As for emissions, even on today's 50%-coal U.S. grid, plug-in cars are cleaner than even the best hybrids. And as we add more wind and solar to the grid, plug-in cars get cleaner. Gasoline just gets dirtier. See an overview of all the emissions data that I put together while researching my upcoming book, Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that will Recharge America:
http://www.sherryboschert.com/FAQ.html
If batteries are the "Achilles heel" of anything that runs off of electricity (in this case cars as the topic is Electric Vehicles) then the same Achilles heel of any engine is its method of fuel storage. How often to motorists get stranded because they ran out of gasoline or diesel? ;)
At the same time, there are far more Achilles heels on an internal combustion engine than there are on a simple electic motor. Such as the alternator, the battery, the water pump, the oil pump, the fuel pump, the timing belt, the fluid levels like coolant water and oil, the radiator and its connecting hoses, and sometimes the fuel filter (if it gets especially clogged.) And then there's the possibility of getting water in the fuel tank when filling up somewhere that doesn't maintain their tanks. How can you "fill up" with "bad" electricity? ;)
As has been already stated, GM's EV was not marketed well, if at all. Why not? Even if you end up with a huge demand and waiting lists, at least you would have an idea of how much people wanted this kind of vehicle (and still do.) And I also would have made sure that the leasing amount was affordable. According to this film's website, they were leased at $400-500 per month. Well, that's twice what I'm able to pay. I don't make $60,000 or more annually. Market to the people (like me) that REALLY need this: the "hoi polloi" :)
Excellent!
Both Plug In America and Phil Karn have it right...
Here are some related links that are sure to provoke additional insight and thought to the issue. Too many folks out there afraid of losing $$$ on existing tech.
Darel's EV page.
http://www.darelldd.com/ev/
The EV1 Club:
http://ev1-club.power.net/
Hybrid Mileage Comes Up Short
http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,63413,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
wow i just can't believe the amount of misinformation about the EV1...its just too ramapnt to refute...did you think making stuff up wold make you look important
I always find it interesting to hear the nitpicking of electric cars, batteries, and quibbling over the efficiency of power plants and the electric grid... as if everything is peachy-keen with the internal-combustion engine, gasoline, and the geopolitics of importing most of our oil.
Noone ever asks why transporting liquid fuel is so energy and infrastructure intensive, why gasoline engines are so inefficient, and why the energy-density of liquid fuels remains depressingly constant. Noone reads up on the history of the internal-combustion engine or appreciates the long and hard struggle to make it as reliable, powerful, and (dismally) efficient as it is today.
Battery technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few decades despite what conventional wisdom keeps shouting. Anyone remember cellphones from 15 years ago? They were called cell bricks for a reason ... running on nickel-cadmium or lead-acid rechargable batteries with a small fraction of the energy density that today's lithium-ion cells have. And the advances keep coming.
I'm not going to debate that economics (or perceptions thereof) killed the EV. The domestic automakers made a fortune for the better part of a decade off their low-investment "invention" if the SUV. Now, due to their failure to think long-term and accept changes to their business model, they are steadily they're losing market share to foreign competitors that plan ahead. "Fast follower" Toyota seems to be leading the race now, of all companies...
The fascinating thing about the EV1 is that it was a production vehicle ... limited-production, but produced in some quantity nonetheless. It wasn't the absolute first or the best ever, but it was the most efficient and highest-tech vehicle of its time and frustrating close to being attainable. In the grand scheme of things, I think that the EV1 is a more memorable and noteworthy accomplishment than a semi-autonomous vehicle.
All I know is that every time that head of GM is whining about his "costs" on the talk circuit, I think of how he trated the EV-1. It was a quantum leap in technlogy that was just tossed away.
I want my electric car, NOW!
First off, Phil what movie had a hydrogen fuel cell car demoed to President Bush?
Now as far as those Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars go, don't be so quick to turn away from them. By going to -
http://www.gm.com/company/onlygm/energy_cell.html
- you can see that the HydroGen 3 gets a 168 to 249 mile range(depending on liquid or compressed form)and, the Sequel gets a 300 mile range. Both of these having zero pollution, only emmission is clean H2O. And this technology is still improving so the ranges should keep going up.
Finally, as far as the Hrdrogen infrastruture goes, D.C. already has a Shell gas station selling Hydrogen, plus other private stations, and New York has at least one station up there somewhere. While yes it won't happen over night, and it will cost money, overall it will benefit the U.S. due to it making us less dependant to nondependant on foreign oil... not to mention that at the rate we are using crude oil, and coal up they won't be around much longer.
Greg, I was referring to the (a?) trailer for "Who Killed the Electric Car?" It includes the demo of hydrogen to Dubya.
I don't doubt that the ranges of hydrogen fuel cell cars can increase with further work. But so can the ranges of electric cars! EV prototypes using Li-ion batteries (which the EV1 never used) now get 300 miles.
The really funny (ironic) thing about hydrogen is that for three years I drove a working hydrogen-fueled car. The Gen 2 EV1 used NiMH batteries, which means it used hydrogen as its fuel, storing it as a metal hydride. Instead of being replaced from an external source, the hydrogen was regenerated when the car was recharged.
Presto, no need for a whole new infrastructure to distribute hydrogen. It took advantage of an existing efficient and ubiquitous energy distribution network, the electric power grid, that already comes to every home. Will hydrogen pumps also be available in every home? I think not.
Hydrogen, as a mobile energy carrier, is *far* less efficient than the power grid and even existing rechargeable battery technologies.
When rechargeable batteries were first developed for consumer use, they were rightly hailed as a great innovation. Instead of throwing away used batteries and going to the store to buy more, you could recharge them from the outlet in your own home. But now we're being told that it's better to go buy a physical, consumable fuel than to enjoy the convenience of batteries that can be recharged in our own homes. Why?
Yes you can recharge the EV cars from the convienence of your own home, but in most of the US that energy is either coming from crude oil or coal, which part of my point was that we can't depend on this source much longer because projections show they won't be around for much longer. yes we have nuclear energy, wind power, hydro power, geothermal power, etc but there are disadvantages to these.
It's been proven by scientists that Nuclear energy can not be used as our main source(I forget the exact reasoning, but I learned about it in an environmental science class)
Wind power takes up too much space which we obviously are running out of (world pop. projected to be 9.5 billion by 2050), and their vibrations are a problem.
Hydro power is limited to location, and when suitable locations are found, huge areas must be flooded, losing valuable real estate, destroying the environment, and displacing or worse killing wildlife.
And geothermal energy is also limited to location, and there is not "enough to go around".
DOW industries is already using Hydrogen Fuel Cells for energy down in Texas. Not sure how many fuel cells they have now but they plan on having a total of 400 which will create 35 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 25,000 of todays average sized homes.
Actually, very little US electricity comes from petroleum. According
to the DOE, in 2004 electric generation used 0.53 million barrels per
day out of a total consumption of 20.52 million barrels/day. That's
only 2.6% of our oil consumption.
Also in 2004, US electric generation used a total of 40.77 quadrillion
BTU. Only 1.28 quadrillion BTU (3.1%) was from oil.
Most oil, of course, goes to transportation (13.62 million
barrels/day, or 66.4%). That's the problem that EVs can solve.
Almost all of the coal mined in the US is used for electric
generation. At current consumption, we have centuries left. More than
we want to burn, though, because of global warming. We have to find
non-fossil alternatives.
Yes, pretty much all of the good US hydroelectric power opportunities
are already taken, but many of the other sources have considerable
promise. Solar is my personal favorite; rooftop solar is arguably the
most benign because it goes on existing buildings. PV economics are a
problem, but they are steadily improving in efficiency and decreasing
in cost. Just project the curves foward in time and it won't be long
until they become quite competitive. Wind uses land, but not
exclusively, and we have many untapped wind resources in the US.
That brings us to nuclear. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, nuclear
power is the worst way to generate electricity except for all the
others. Every form of electrical generation has disadvantages, but we
cannot afford to write off *any* method that does not use fossil fuels
or produce CO2. That includes nuclear. While I'm all in favor of
expanding development and deployment of wind and solar, the simple
fact is that nuclear is the only proven near-term option to generate
large amounts of electricity without generating greenhouse gases or
pollution. Three Mile Island notwithstanding, western reactor designs
have proven themselves very safe and reliable. Waste disposal is a
purely political and emotional problem; technically, it was solved
decades ago.
My point is that only the EV has the potential of getting
transportation off oil and onto a diverse range of energy sources that
produce no CO2 and no air pollution. There are many ways to produce
electricity, many more than there are to power internal combustion
engines.
Take a close look at those fuel cell projects. You may well find that
the hydrogen is produced from natural gas, a fossil fuel. That
consumes energy and produces CO2 as a byproduct. If you're going to start
with natural gas, you might as well burn it in a turbine. The
50-60% efficiency of modern combined-cycle gas turbines is actually better
than all the fuel cells I've seen. Remember, fuel cells are merely an energy conversion method; they are not an energy source.
Yes, there was a demand for the EV1 but was it ENOUGH of a demand for GM to continue?
GM didn't think so. Gas was cheap, near it's historic low when adjusted for inflation.
Here's a graph. http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/gasol.htm
Did you know GM has partnered with DaimlerChrysler and BMW to produce a hybrid transmission? Here's a link.
http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=10933
Production starts in 2007. It will be used in large vehicles first, the most fuel consumptive vehicles, which makes sense. It is supposed to increase efficiency by at least 25%. Unlike other manufacturers designs towing is not restricted.
I guess I should have added that the new transmission in hundreds of thousands if not millions of vehicles has the potential of saving far more fuel than a few thousand or possibly tens of thousands of all electric vehicles. GM reallocated their technology budget to the vehicles that people actually buy. And...as I said before, GM has not thrown away the technology used in the EV1. When it becomes a viable business proposition they can be there.
By the way, the technology of the new transmission is an adaptation of a hybrid bus transmission developed by GM. It must be pretty good for DaimlerChrysler and BMW to sign on.
As for nuclear, there are other, more efficient reactor designs out there that solve the waste problem quite well. Look into the "Integral Fast Reactor" - it recycles all the long-halflife isotopes every time its fuel is reprocessed to separate out the true waste from the remaining fissionable material. The reactor design is much simpler that the existing light-water designs and inherently safe (if anything goes wrong such as loss of coolant or overheating, the reaction itself simply throttles back or shuts down without intervention). Centuries of fuel for this sort of reactor already exists in storage pools and radioactive waste dumps across the country.
There are also breeder reactors that generate their own supply of plutonium These are much more efficient than light-water reactors, but have some technical challenges - such as their use of liquid-metal coolant.
Phil, I have to disagree that nuclear waste disposal is only a political and emotional problem. Radioactive waste that lasts tens of thousands of years is a problem no matter how you store it.
And as for hydrogen -- Extracting hydrogen for use requires either natural gas or electricity. It takes 4 times as much electricity to run a hydrogen car the same distance as an electric car because you have to use electricity to make hydrogen to run what's essenti