General Motors EV1

In the United States, the government gave a massive subsidy to the big three to try and figure this thing out.

General Motors was the only one that actually completed a project and made it financially viable to go out to public use, the GM EV1.

It was a success to showcase electric vehicles, but it was also a gamble at a point in time when gas was still cheap and people weren't into buying something that would only get 60 miles on a charge [laughs] that took all night.

But that's not the vehicle we're talking about.

But he originally didn't create Tesla Motors, and that's, that's actually gonna come out in the movie Musk about Elon Musk eventually, and you'll find out that, yeah, he actually stole somebody else's thing and eventually kicked them out for making anything off of it.

But Tesla bet it hard at a time when people weren't gonna allow electric vehicles to come through.

The EV1 project came and went, and big oil tried to kick it down a notch.

But Tesla went in hard.

In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put a Fiat people carrier on a plinth alongside the General Motors EV1 and the first Toyota Prius.

The exhibition was an argument about what cars would become over the next 100 years.

Top Gear voted the same car its Car of the Year, and Top Gear also voted it the ugliest thing on the road.

It's almost like a religion.

And then you talk about people that I've been privileged to work with on the EV1.

I mean, some of the most bright minds that worked on that electric vehicle.

That was the General Motors EV1.

That was the General Motors EV1.

Well, I was assigned in 1989, so I was one of the first engineers assigned to that project.

And it ended abruptly in about 1997 when they crushed all the cars because General Motors took advantage of the CAFE requirements being repealed by the U.S. government.

I said, okay.

It absolutely breaks my heart.

The EV1 General Motors battery electric vehicle became the centerpiece of one of the most discussed corporate conspiracy theories of the modern era.

The 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, asked the question directly.

And in 2026, as electric vehicles finally dominate new car sales, the question of whether the transition was delayed by decades through deliberate suppression has never felt more consequential.

Tonight we examine the evidence, the documented history of electric vehicle suppression, the specific EV1 case, the battery technology that was bought and shelved, and the oil industry's documented campaign to kill the zero-emission vehicle mandate that created the EV1 in the first place.

Detailed explanation, the electric car is not a recent invention.

The first practical electric vehicles appeared in the 1880s.

at the same time as the first petrol-powered cars in the early nineteen hundreds electric cars outsold petrol cars in the united states by nineteen ten they had lost the market defeated by longer range cheaper fuel and henry ford's mass production of the model t for most of the twentieth century the electric vehicle was dormant It returned involuntarily in 1990 when the California Air Resources Board passed the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, a regulatory requirement that 2% of new vehicles sold in California by 1998 must produce zero emissions.

A lot of people get offended by it.

But that's essentially what the original GM EV1 was.

And we want to bring something like that back.

We remember the nostalgia.

And a lot of the development efforts and the manufacturing deployment effort was in the U.S. and Japan.

Yeah, so that was the EV1 era, essentially, right? That's

correct.

And that's basically where you came into the battery industry.

And we just interviewed Bob Gallion talking about the development of EV1 in the previous podcast episode.

So really kind of a full circle moment here.

So what made you start paying more attention to lithium?

Finishing up the PNGV, I think we finished that program up around 2001 with three vehicles that were demonstration vehicles that were released, one by GM, Ford, and then Chrysler at that time, now Stellantis.

It made its debut in 2010 as the world's first mass market electric and zero emission vehicle.

Now, the real gearheads in the audience may know about General Motors' EV1, which was designed and produced in the 90s, but only around 1,000 units were ever built, and the EV1 never made it to the consumer market.

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Same thing with General Motors.

I mean, in the 90s, what was it, 1992, they had the EV1.

And they even had a lithium version, which was going to double the range.

And then General Motors said, no, it's all too hard.