Why did GM crush all the EV-1s?

[Karrmann]

i'm wondering why Gm crushed all of the EV-1s like shown on this website

http://ev1-club.power.net/

[drakkie]

they dont want their good (?) image to be further reduced to scratch by this car

[Quiggs]

Every single EV1 was sold on a lease-only program, you could not buy it to own. The EV was an experiment for GM to see if an electric vehicle would make sense to sell on a grand scale. As it turned out, it wasn't, and after all the leases were up, they had roughly 1500 useless cars sitting around. What would you have done with them?

[henk4]

Citroen did a similar thing with the rotary engined M35 and GS Birotor from the seventies. only very few have survived.

[Wouter Melissen]

There is one in the Henry Ford museum.

[Esperante]

Shame it didn't cross their minds that people who don't drive so much could've snapped these cars up if they were for sale....

[ScionDriver]

Because they sucked. Just kidding, they were very ahead of their time, in a way. But yeah, I saw the one in the Henry Ford museum.

[Quiggs]

Shame it didn't cross their minds that people who don't drive so much could've snapped these cars up if they were for sale....

Problem was, producing OEM replacement parts for a car that had 1500 originally built, would be astronomical.

[Matra et Alpine]

Conspiracy theorists would suggest that far from beign "ecological" that having reached the end of their battery life they faced a HUGE problem in removing and replacing them for a reasoanble time. Easiest to jsut scrap them, take the one time waste-management cost and move on

[Matt]

The technology on the EV-1 was considered experimental, therefore GM didn't feel comfortable selling the cars. So, they leased them instead. That made them responsible for all the maintenance on the cars. As the maintenance became more of a burden, GM started taking them back from their lessees.

[Karrmann]

well it just kinda urks me, because it seems that Gm kinda has it's head in the sand, It crushes all it electric vehicles, then comes out with it's 9 MPG Hummers, id doesn't really make sense.

[Matt]

well it just kinda urks me, because it seems that Gm kinda has it's head in the sand, It crushes all it electric vehicles, then comes out with it's 9 MPG Hummers, id doesn't really make sense.

Right, because from a business standpoint (GM IS a business, Karrmann), it doesn't make sense to dump a line of 1,100 cars that had become a maintenance nightmare in order to build a highly-profitable vehicle that they can sell world-wide. I mean, really - makes no sense at all.

[Esperante]

well it just kinda urks me, because it seems that Gm kinda has it's head in the sand, It crushes all it electric vehicles, then comes out with it's 9 MPG Hummers, id doesn't really make sense.

It's like this.
You run a snack shop. You sell good pizza. It's expensive though, so you sell them crap. it's cheaper, and the customers still buy.
There you go.

[Quiggs]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Mar9.html

Enthusiasts discovered a stash of about 77 surviving EV1s behind a GM training center in Burbank and last month decided to take a stand.

So there's a few left that people are trying to save. I doubt this will work. GM would have an obligation to produce parts for a minimum of 15 years for a car there'd be less than 100 of? I don't think so.

[Karrmann]

yeah, they sould bring it back, I would buy one, and besides, of they sold them the maitnence problems would be the consumer's problem, not GMs.