Has anyone seen this movie yet? It’s out on DVD now. I watched it last night and it is crazy how GM reposessed all of their EV1 cars. No options to renew the lease and no options to buy for the residual.
They didn’t keep driving them even though they were perfectly good, low maintenance, cars. Instead, they rounded up every car and systematically crushed them. Ford and Honda did the same thing.
:dunno:
There has to be a logical explanation for this. It makes absolutely no sense. I guess some business reason? Why crush the cars? Why not let the customers pay money for them and keep using them?
They were highly unprofitable, low production, and horrible range. They didn’t want another Corvair media nightmare, so they rounded them up, and crushed them. The tech wasn’t ready for widespread use, and nobody wanted to be the first one to get burned. It makes for great conspiracy theory shit though.
the people who possessed them seemed pretty willing to pay whatever they could to keep them.
they had a “buyer” for every car produced.
No one in my immediate family (myself excluded) ever drives farther than Cranberry. When they go on vacation, they either fly or rent a conversion van. My mom’s Elantra, my step-dad’s Malibu, and my grandmother’s Accent could all easily be replaced by EVs.
pull that shit out of your ass, or are you moonlighting as GM’s PR guy? the cars were on the road for ten years and i never saw negative media coverage on them. in fact, as long as we keep fucking up iraq, the media has a “gloom and doom” goldmine. what negative could the media report on? the car performed as it was meant to.
Sure they only drive 60 miles round trip to work, but what if you want to go somewhere at night? Do you have 8 hours to charge it up? What if you get home late, and have to leave early in the AM? Oops…
Come to think of it…I NEVER saw an EV1 on the road, period.
I guess you’re right, people would have probably paid the $80k back in 1990 to have a car that couldn’t go further than 100 miles without an 8 hour recharge. You got it…I was trying to cover for GM, but I’ll let you hear the truth now! Hugo Chavez threatened the GM execs and forced them to halt production! Conspiracy Theory ROCKS!
Your family all drives econo-buckets that sticker today for less than the EV1 was back in the early 90s. Maybe you guys would pay more to get less, but the rest of America wouldn’t, and GM knew it.
The price for the car used to compute lease payments was $33,995 to $43,995, which made for lease payments of $299 to over $574 per month. One industry official said that each EV1 cost the company about $80,000, including research, development and other associated costs.
GM stated that it could not sell enough of the cars to make the EV1 profitable In fact, during the latter stages of development for the car, GM officials admitted that they stood no chance of ever making a profit on the EV-1 itself. Instead, the company hoped that the EV-1 would prove their technology and establish a “leadership” position within the Electric Vehicle market.
They only sold the EV1 in California and Arizona. Probably why we have never seen them here. It makes perfect sense to discontinue the car if you will never make any money on it. But, why reposess and destroy the existing cars? That’s unprecedented. Ford never reposessed every Pinto with an exploding gas tank. Even if the EV1 had lots of faults, the consumers still loved them and wanted to buy them back.
This is the only part that is reasonable:
Because of low demand for the EV1, parts suppliers quit making replacement parts making future repair and safety of the vehicles difficult to nearly impossible
But, again, lots of discontinued (and foreign) cars have expensive or hard to find replacement parts. The auto companies never incur extra cost to remove all of the cars from existence, to protect the customer.