Farewell to the EV1

The GM proving ground in Mesa is receiving the remnants of the EV1 fleet, according to this article:

General Motors is shipping the last surviving EV1 cars, the automaker's unique experiment in battery-powered transportation, from a storage yard in Burbank, Calif., to the GM Desert Proving Grounds in Mesa for "final disposition," which for most of them means crushing and recycling.

The Mister and I were offered the chance to drive one of SRP's cars for a week when they first came out, and we fell in love with it. It was quiet, it was sporty, it really had some get up and go, and it had one fatal flaw: the battery only lasted about 40 miles (we gave lots of rides to folks, and just HAD to show them the possible accelertion - but that drained the battery faster than) and woe to you if you ran it out before finding a charging station. I remember the Mister coasting in to the airport, just barely making it to the all-important plug.

The owners who leased them want to buy them, but GM isn't allowing this:

There are several reasons GM refuses to sell the remaining EV1s, he said, with product liability the greatest concern. The experimental cars have about 2,000 unique parts, he said, that are no longer available from either GM or any other source. There are no technicians outside GM who can work on the highly complex vehicles, he said. That means private owners would not be able to maintain the cars, which would not only tarnish GM's reputation when they break down but create safety hazards. "Some of these parts, such as the electronic brakes, have serious safety concerns," he said. "If somebody should hit somebody else, in this litigious society we could have a problem."The EV1s will not all disappear, Barthmuss added. GM has donated a number of them to colleges and universities for engineering students and to several museums, including a recent donation to the Smithsonian Institution, he said. GM engineers are currently testing EV1s in cold climates. The electric-car experiment was not a failure, he said, although they were doomed when the expected breakthrough in battery technology never materialized to give the cars greater range between chargings. "We believe the EV1 has been a tremendous success in developing technology," he said, noting that systems created for the EV1 are now used in hybrid vehicles and fuel-cell advancements. "There will be a little bit of EV1 in every hybrid and fuel-cell car."

Still, I'd hoped that they might get that battery thing figured out; we'd have bought one in a heartbeat.