25 years of General Motors EV1
06/04/2021
It's actually hard to believe that the EV1 from General Motors is already 25 years old. As a reminder, the EV1 was an electric car that GM built from 1996 to 1999 as a tribute to stricter environmental regulations in California. You couldn't buy it, you could only lease it and in the end GM took all the vehicles back and had them scrapped. There is a movie worth seeing about this with Martin Sheen, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and other well-known actors and the title "Who killed the electric car?".
Hardly any of them survived. Unfortunately! Even today, some of its features still seem more than just contemporary. For example, the car was as streamlined as the much later VW XL1. The GM EV1 had a drag coefficient of 0.19 cw and a cross-sectional area of 1.95 square meters. By comparison, the VW XL1 had a drag coefficient of 0.186 cw and a cross-sectional area of 1.5 square meters, albeit with significantly less everyday utility. A modern VW ID.3 is listed with 0.267 cw and a frontal area of 2.36 square meters. The calculated aerodynamic drag is therefore 0.3705 for the EV1, 0.279 for the XL1 and 0.63 for the ID.3.
They also tried to build the EV1 light, 1400 kg dead weight was quite a feat, considering that the car had to carry around a huge amount of lead batteries just to get a range of just under 90 kilometers. Of course, more modern batteries could have significantly improved this, and with a Tesla battery pack of today, fabulous ranges would probably be possible. But the EV1 came out in 1996 and disappeared as it had come, without a predecessor or successor. What a shame!
