General Motors was ahead of the curve when it came to EVs — too ahead of the curve, in fact. The tale of the company’s forward-looking EV1 project of the late 1990s is one of optimistic striving leading to dashed hopes and horrible PR. The program was shuttered, the cars were crushed, and the world moved on but arguably never forgave and certainly never forgot. But there are tales of the EV1 as yet untold — like this one about a convertible version that was more than just an idea — it was actually built. And The Autopian was sure to get the inside story and photos from a man who was there on the ground floor.
The EV1, as we know it, was a two-seater coupe. The lack of extra seats or doors helped to save weight, thus aiding the range of the EV in an era when battery technology—to put it politely—sucked. However, as it turns out, the EV1 wasn’t just a coupe. Within the secretive halls of GM’s prototype development labs lurked not only a four-seater EV1 prototype, but a two-seat roadster as well! All this in the mid-1990s, over a decade before the Tesla Roadster ever hit the streets.
Jim Deidun knows all about the EV1 and its history. Taking on a job as a mock-up technician at GM’s Tech Center in 1990, he quickly rose through the ranks. Eventually, Deidun would become a manager for GM’s prototyping shop charged with the development of electric vehicle projects, including the EV1. He was kind enough to share his stories of the EV1 and dug into his personal photo archives for The Autopian. “I managed the prototype shop that included a mock-up shop, a wood shop, a plastic shop, metal shop and machine shop, along with the vehicle build shop and garage,” Deidun told The Autopian. “I saw the EV1 go from its first line on paper to cardboard models, to wood, then to fiberglass, and then finally into production tools.”
As you might expect, given they never saw public release, the variant bodystyles weren’t a key part of GM’s grand plan. “The official plan for the EV1 was to build only the coupe with no other variants,” explains Deidun. “These were cobbled together vehicles used as technology demonstration vehicles.”
The four-seater itself was an official project, but the roadster version was more of an underground effort, without the involvement of GM’s designers. “It came about because the director of Electric Vehicle engineering asked me if my team was up to the task of building an EV1 Roadster with no design staff support,” says Deidun.
The job of producing a 1/10 scale mockup was given to one of his best model makers, with no real design or drawings to work from. After working with the model maker for a few weeks, the mockup was completed. “Senior management loved it and approved fabrication for the full-scale EV1,” says Deidun. There was just one problem—the project had been given the go-ahead by the EV management team, but not the corporate design staff at GM.
In any case, work on the roadster began with a brand-new EV1. It needed hidden rollbars installed and to be reshaped to work as a roofless design. All was going well, until one fateful visit to the workshop spoiled everything.
“About halfway through the fabrication, a manager without a clue from the EV1 team brought a Design Staff employee in for a tour of the shop after hours,” laments Deidun. “The next day the direction came down to stop all work on the Roadster and get it out of the building.”
According to Deidun, the incomplete build was still in storage when he left the automaker in 2009. “GM had tried to get me to scrap it several times,” he says. “I kept it in hiding for 10 years.” Sadly, though, he suspects it is no more. “When I left, nobody was looking after it anymore; I am sure that it’s been scrapped by now.”
The four-seater EV1 had an altogether less troubled upbringing. According to Deidun, it was conceived in the summer of 1997, as GM was looking to keep the EV1 alive and spotlight potential hybrid technologies. It would go on to build series and parallel hybrid versions as well as a fuel cell prototype and one powered by compressed natural gas.
Indeed, the series hybrid version, pictured wearing a “THM 653” number plate, featured a gas turbine out of a Tomahawk cruise missile, according to Deidun. Contemporary resources state the “auxiliary power unit” (APU) was provided by Williams International, which also famously built the Williams F107 engine used in the Tomahawk. It’s entirely possible the APU was a relative of this engine, given that it wouldn’t make sense for the company to spend millions developing a gas turbine from scratch for a project that didn’t get far beyond some demo vehicles at a car show. In the series hybrid, the Williams APU was capable of running on compressed natural gas or gasoline. GM claimed the car could achieve 60 mpg running on the latter, with a total range of 390 miles. Alternatively, it would achieve 40 miles running solely in electric mode.
The cars were displayed at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show and LA Auto Show. Getting the prototypes ready for the January debut in Michigan went down to the wire. According to Deidun, work was ongoing seven days a week from July through to January 3, the day before the show opened in Cabo Hall on January 4, 1998. Indeed, the cars themselves were still in pieces on New Year’s Day, with two still in paint just days before the show.
Despite all the effort involved, it just wasn’t to be. “The four-seater was completely designed in CAD and was almost production-ready when the decision was made to cancel the EV1 program,” says Deidun. Ultimately, it would instead be a much longer road for EVs to become a regular sight on the roads as they are today. In any case, GM would later regret at least one aspect of canceling the EV1. In 2007, GM’s R&D chief Larry Burns admitted an opportunity had been missed when talking to Newsweek. “If we could turn back the hands of time, we could have had the Chevy Volt ten years earlier,” said Burns.
The GM EV1 is a little bit like the band Nirvana. Its legend is all the more captivating because it was wrested from us too soon. Had GM simply built the cars, sold them for a few years, and then tailed off, they’d be an interesting curiosity that we’d all mention at the pub now and then. Instead, by killing the program and working so hard to destroy the cars that were left, GM made the EV1 a martyr for a world that wasn’t yet ready for electric drive. It was even the subject of a popular documentary called “Who Killed The Electric Car” that detailed all of the missteps made by the company.
Not only were we robbed of a decent electric car in the 1990s, we were also robbed of a weird and surely wonderful roadster EV, too. To say nothing of the practical benefits that the four-seater model would have promised.
Of course, GM wasn’t entirely unjustified in ending the Ev1 program when it did. Most commentators will tell you the Nissan Leaf came out too soon, to say nothing of the EV1, which was released over 13 years prior. Battery technology simply wasn’t there, and neither was charging. An earlier start might have developed things faster, but ultimately, the EV would have its day. It just came a lot later than GM and the EV1 team would have wished it, though today GM is selling attractive crossovers like the Lyriq and Blazer EV as well as an attractive electrified hybrid AWD Corvette E-Ray.
Would an attractive EV1 roadster have saved the day? It’s impossible to know, but about a decade later a much smaller American company called Tesla decided to launch an electric car. Rather than start with a sedan, the company took a Lotus Elise convertible and transformed it into the Tesla Roadster. That first car wasn’t produced in huge numbers, but it was the start of something amazing, and earlier today Tesla announced it sold 1.8 million electric cars in 2023. This EV1 Roadster is just another reminder of what could have been.
Image credits: Jim Deidun except where stated and hat tip to Cy!
I wonder what type of range we would see in an EV1 with a modern battery, motor, and management system.
If you thought the range on the EV1 coupe was mediocre, I can only imagine how miserable a drop-top would be.
Nice to see there was a story there 🙂 Great write up.
Gimme tomahawk powered 60mpg roadster and nobody gets hurt! Capisce ?!
The aero penalty from removing the roof was likely such that you’d probably be looking at 40 mpg instead, assuming the coupe got 60 mpg.
And throw in a F-22 Raptor canopy if you know what’s good for ya!
Man, a digital dash evoking the F22 Raptor would be SWEET.
I’m using Intellitronix digital gauges in my electric Triumph GT6 for this very reason. Mid 20th century retro streamliner on the outside, cyberpunk on the inside, with a 21st century drive system, is the goal…
I fear we recreated “The Homer”.
“The Homer” was clumsy, unaerodynamic, fat, and overly busy. Just look at it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHGczDHTDpo
Quite right. This article is the first I’ve heard of a gas turbine in a ev1 and lost it! I’m sure you recall our previous conversations about the Precept.
I’ve seen pics online of a gas turbine EV1 20 years ago. I’m not sure how many there were. It appeared as if the example I saw did not have the turbine permanently mounted, and looked non-OEM.
GM being GM – seems like everything good has to happen in secret there.
I had to double check your masthead. Is Toecutter on the editorial staff now?
I remember seeing one of these in a parking lot at Virginia Tech back in 2014.. wish I had taken some pictures or gotten a closer look, surely it’s gone now.
“General Motors is not in the business of making cars. It is in the business of making money.” – Thomas Murphy, GM CEO
The EV1 was never going to be a success at GM for the exact reasons that Toecutter mentioned. If it had been an immediate hit, GM management would have tried to monetize it immediately to extract profits to pay back the R&D and pad the next quarter’s bottom line. That is the reason that all GM moonshots get the axe if money gets tight or their champions lose power.
Compare that to Tesla that was able to build out the Supercharger network using investment dollars, lose money on each car while building scale, continually improve their processes to reduce costs, and relentlessly expand their capacity. A typical GM CEO has a 5 year tenure. That is not enough time to launch, nurture, and harvest an expensive and risky project like making EVs viable.
It was never sold to the public to even test if it would be a hit or not.
Lessees begged to buy the cars, there were crowds of willing participants for the lease program turned away at dealerships, the cars had very little advertising(and what little there was makes you think of what sort of drugs the marketing department was on, and not in a good way), but in the end, they were all taken back and crushed, excepting a small number given to universities or hidden for decades.
GM didn’t want this car to succeed. It was a threat to other GM products that were already making them lots of money.
GM probably didn’t want to get saddled with the upkeep of these vehicles that were never going to be viable as a product with the level of tech. The EVs we have now are only really useful to a subset of the motoring public as it is.
They already spent the non-recoverable costs for design and tooling, and THEN threw away any chance to get that sunk cost back by choosing not to produce them in volume.
There are things they could have done other than kill it. They could possibly even have made a gasoline ICE version using that platform that could have been a halo car for fuel economy and/or performance.
If you’re going to lose money on every vehicle, producing them in volume isn’t going to help. I doubt with the tech available then that they were going to sell very many of these as EVs. It’s possible they might have been able to use this for an ICE vehicle, but if that wasn’t part of the original design considerations it could have been too expensive to retrofit. And as noted below, they might not have passed safety regs.
Whether they lose money on every vehicle or not depends on a lot of factors. What the MSRP is and how many people actually buy them are the big ones. All of the largest costs were already sunk. GM designed a complete car passing existing regulations that was ready to be produced and sold to the public by that point. Fuzzyweis noted that it was the upcoming safety regulations that were a possible issue, not the existing regulations, although I never read that and I don’t know where he read that from(I’ll have to try to find it out of curiosity).
Per unit, it mostly would have been materials costs and distribution costs from then on. If the car was destined to lose money, the overall total losses on the program could actually have been decreased by selling the cars. And if enough cars were sold to recoup the losses over time, an actual profit could have been made, but that might have been 5-10 years out.
The problem is that nothing like this car had existed on the market before. Whether it was a guaranteed loss, or somehow profitable, was a giant question mark. Public reception to the car was overwhelmingly positive, which often isn’t the case for something so novel and different.
Whether it would have been a success or not was entirely an unknown. Because the overly conservative to a fault GM never even tried, they instead blew over $1 billion on what amounted to a concept car, which is a ridiculous waste.
I thought I read somewhere that the EV1s were on borrowed time when released due to safety regulations at the time, they basically wouldn’t pass upcoming safety requirements, and indeed just had a 3 star rating in 1998. The infamous crushing was not only due to GM not wanting to make spare parts for them, but also due to the safety rating. So for the coupe to be that unsafe, the roadster would be even less so.
Not saying it isn’t cool, and I love reading about EV1 history as it was really a moonshot kind of program.
Now the reason GM killed their PHEVs 6 years ago, that’s just them shooting themselves in their nethers. Could’ve been cranking out Voltec Blazers and raking in some of that sweet Wrangler 4Xe cash, but no, we’re gonna build a $100,000 Hummer EV that weighs 10,000 lbs and has more batteries than a half dozen Bolts and gets worse MPGe than a Maverick, yee-haw, pew pew take that nethers!
All PHEVS by design will have batteries that fail when warranty is out or before. Take the EV range and multiply it by 1000 (the number of cycles current battery tech can handle before range drops) and you get the total EV mileage you can expect you PHEV to do before you have battery woes…and definitely by 1500 cycles. So take a PHEV with 30 mile EV range and your battery will falter by 30,000 EV miles and fail by 50,000 EV miles. If you run mostly on fuel in your PHEV it may take time to reach 30,000 all EV miles but if you charge it daily(or twice if you charge at work before returning home) you will reach that cycle count within 5 years. Not an issue for full EV’s because 1000 cylces on a 300mile battery will get you 300,000 miles on the odometer before you see significan range drop.
As PHEVs and EVs have only been around for about 10 years, not sure where those statistics are from. I had over 70K miles on my 2014 Chevrolet Volt, put at least 30K miles on it as mostly EV, and still got near 30 miles of range when I sold it, so from my experience that’s not true. Also have to take into account how well the PHEV manages it’s battery, Voltec had good reserve and thermal management, compared to like a Leaf which, does not. It’s like saying all engines will die after 200K miles.
Lol, I have 125,000 miles on my Volt. Don’t know the exact number but definitely more than 50k electric miles. This is probably gonna jinx it but it’s still going strong for now.
That 1000 charge discharge cycles is an almost worst case scenario. With good battery management and limiting the charge and discharge to 80%20% I bet you could easily make it through the useable life of a car or sooner if you get into a car accident.
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”
(John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller)
Great story Lewin! Btw, when are you going to get a bio for your by-lines? All the other contributors have one but yours is suspiciously blank. Are you real or just an AI? I mean, if you had a bio, we’d know you were real, ‘cause that can’t be faked or anything, right?
I am real! I have no idea how to add or change a bio but I’ll totally look into it.
aaaaaaand it’s done
Sweet! That’s the kind of responsiveness you can only get from the Autopian! And all the way from the Land Down Under too :-). I hope we get to hear more about the robots sometime. I used to be the Lab Director for an on-line remote access science lab for the Colorado Community College System and we used robots and cameras to let students remotely control lab equipment from all over the world. Our farthest access was from Guam, and they had to put up with a minor bit of lag, but it worked!
Alternate timeline history I sometimes dream about – Rather than throwing a world class temper tantrum over the California EV mandate, GM continues to develop its EV tech and maintains a decades long lead in the EV game. Because of this huge advantage, they continue to attract and keep the best EV engineers in the land. Instead of a Tesla Roadster, the world gets a GM EV1 Roadster. Because GM is a huge company, a young upstart nobody doesn’t have enough daddy gem money to buy it out and he goes back to South Africa to cry as another unheard-of failure.
Way to go GM.
A big part of my professional life, is reading between the lines or in other words, reading the actual intent of the writter of any given text or verbal uttering for that matter.
One of the obvious tell tell signs, is a lack of sanity/proofreading. It typically points to a writer that is either angry in the moment or generally lacks emotional control.
“Because GM is a huge company, a young upstart nobody doesn’t have enough daddy gem money to buy it out and he goes back to South Africa to cry as another unheard-of failure.”
Are you absolutely certain that you have not allrady transferred to a different timeline a long time ago.?
The EV1 coupe (wild having to specify that after all these years) isn’t what I’d call an attractive car. Very much function over form.
The roadster, though, now that’s cute. Almost certainly not enough to save the EV1 program, but I dig it.
It could have been a sort of miniature muscle car with some tweaks, without increasing the drag.
I think the 4th generation Camaro had a lot to teach it. The shape of the EV1 would have worked perfectly with that Camaro’s features.
As it was, it was an outlier in a sea of designs that were universally form over function. A well designed car SHOULD be function first over form, but hardly anyone ever does that, and when they do, the cars end up rare, highly coveted, and often worth millions of dollars at auction.
It’s cool to me in the same way I dig some generations of Honda Insight and the latest Prius. The roadster, that is. The coupe, eh.
That 4-seat EV1 is lovely. It just needs a white roof.
It’s funny to think where we’d be if 2000s design had gone in that direction instead.
Also, a lot of people don’t know that the inverter powering the GM Impact, the prototype version of the EV1 pictured above in the article with the small air intake, was designed by non-other than Alan Cocconi, who founded AC Propulsion, which licensed its AC inverter technology to Tesla. Alan designed a built-in 110VAC charger into the inverter so that customers wouldn’t have to pay extra to charge at home, but GM wanted to scrap that feature in favor of its proprietary Magnecharge system, all in effort to further nickel-and-dime EV1 customers. It is a major reason Alan left GM and founded his own company.
The team that built the T-Zero! And then didn’t commercialize it!
It was a Piontek Sportech kit car used as a donor platform. It was originally meant to use a Suzuki GSX-R 1324cc motorcycle engine and transmission with an electric motor for reverse. This vehicle weighed somewhere around 1,350 lbs.
The TZero was intended to be a test platform for the drive system, IIRC.
It used about 180 Wh/mile at 60 mph when fitted with 28 Optima D750 Yellowtop lead acid batteries with the car weighing 2,400 lbs, doing 0-60 mph in 4.1 seconds, 1/4 mile in 13.3 seconds, and top speed of 90 mph, with an 80-100 mile range doing 60-70 mph on the highway.
A Li Ion version was made, where energy consumption dropped to 160 Wh/mi from weight reduction using a 50 kWh Li Ion pack of 18650s, the car weighing 1,900 lbs, doing 0-60 mph in 3.6 seconds, 1/4 mile in 12.2 seconds, top speed increase to 105 mph, with now a 300 mile range doing 60 mph on the highway.
I’m not a GM loyalist by any means… But I have to believe that GM is the most “Monday morning quarterbacked“ corporation in US history. The should’ves never stop.
Being snarky, I can imagine that the Design Staff employee going full apeshit seeing this half-built weird-looking Frenchy-styled, aero-electric vehicle in the shop. I can imagine him saying “let’s get piece of shit out of here so you can build real American vehicles like C1500‘s and Suburbans like God intended. That’s an order.”
Probably one of the most mismanaged, misguided, and myopic corporations in history as well. It would be dead without taxpayer-funded bailouts, and generally doesn’t look beyond the next quarterly report(unless it’s a long-term way to screw more money out of people).
They have the best engineering talent in the world, and they routinely squander it by building cookie-cutter designs made to appease the upper management instead of the customers, more often than not scientifically formulated to extract as much money as possible from the customers before ending up in a landfill. The exceptions that made it through, the cars that run longer poorly than many new cars run at all, generally are highly cherished things. The customers buy their products anyway because they don’t know any better, and when they do stop buying, big daddy government comes to GM’s rescue with the bailout money, money forcibly taken from our paychecks.
Had the EV1 been improved/refined and sold to willing buyers for years by the time the fuel crisis of 2008 hit and the SUVs/trucks started piling up in dealership lots, GM may never have needed a bailout at all, Tesla would have probably never existed, and EV adoption today would be much further ahead of where it currently is.
That may well be true. But you’ve only bolstered my main point.
I find it utterly amazing that GM still exists as it does DESPITE one hundred years of botched management and second-guessing.
From the 1920’s and Durant and every subsequent generation of GM as a corporation in every decade in America, they are here for us to scorn.
Government-aided helps of course. But so were countless other huge corporations like AMC, Jeep, US Steel, PanAm, General Electric, Exxon, IBM, and so on. They either don’t exist independently (or at all) or don’t have a constant chatter of screwed-it-up-ness and eye-rolling like GM.
The difference is that the general population doesn’t see those other companies or products the same way, or Americans are just loyal to GM to a fault or GM is just plain lucky.
Americans are not loyal to GM to a fault, the company’s market share has cratered to 16.8%, from 20% after their bailout, and 24% pre-bankruptcy
GM management was incompetent for decades, the fact that they didn’t collapse before 2009 was simply that their size allowed them to coast along on their own inertia for a time until the damage finally caught up. Roger Smith’s entire tenure as CEO was a complete disaster from start to finish that the company never recovered from, they treaded water during the ’90s and ’00s, and any improvements that started to be made during the 2000s were too little too late, their debt load by that point had reached lethal proportions and couldn’t be fixed outside of a bankruptcy
And it was lethal, General Motors Corporation liquidated itself and went out of business in 2011, the company that exists now was newly established in 2009 as NGMCO LLC, and later changed its name to General Motors Company after acquiring the bulk of what were considered to be GM’s viable assets (but then backtracked on that and ended up ditching many of them, eg, Opel/Vauxhall and Holden)
I see. Thanks.
Sort of like Apple (1997), Chrysler (2009), and Marvel Entertainment (1996), they live another day after bankruptcy and most people are none the wiser.
GM is like a Phoenix (but not Pontiac Phoenix), they rise from ashes of bankruptcy.
Apple never went bankrupt, they came very close to it and avoided it in part by a timely investment from Microsoft that helped prop them up during a difficult patch, GM also skirted close to bankruptcy several times before it finally happened – the early 1920s right after WWI and the early 1990s were probably the two most serious, but the early 1980s and early 2000s were pretty rocky also
Funny thing about the Marvel bankruptcy. The CEO at the time tried to save the company by pivoting to film. The shareholders (led by Carl Icahn, who can suck it) poo pooed the idea.
I think that it’s probably more about marking one’s territory in the corporation.
GM Design Staff worked on the EV1, yes. However, the roadster was done by the prototype shop. If it went public and everyone hung shit on it, the media would be absolutely ripping into GM’s designers. Some of the execs, and especially shareholders, might have had a poorer opinion of them as a result.
Thus, I suspect that’s why the Design Staff wanted it killed. They hadn’t created it, but it could have reflected poorly on them. They were making it clear who was in charge of design. My theory, not fact, but yeah.
“All was going well, until one fateful visit to the workshop spoiled everything.”
GM isn’t alone in this, but this stupid internal politics BS/ “not invented here” syndrome is definitely something that holds innovation back, especially at big OEMs
Not only that, we were robbed of a platform that is highly aerodynamically efficient even compared to the best of today’s offerings 25 years later.
They could have made a variant of the 4-seater with the 3800 V6 to help increase production volume of the platform and drive down per-unit costs for the EVs. Imagine the fuel economy possible with such a slippery thing. A 3800 V6 would have made for a reliable, non-hybrid car that could eek out 50 mpg highway and 25+ mpg city, and it could have been geared for a faster-than-Corvette top speed and reached it on the limited horsepower available.
GM was conceptually ahead of the game by decades, even ahead of where it is today, and threw it away.
Holy crap, Toecutter advocating for gas engines in electric cars. 2024 is gonna be a weird year
I prefer EVs to ICEs, but this strategy would have helped get the cost of the EV down by increasing the production volume of parts and decreasing the per unit costs thereof.
Faster than a Corvette? Couldn’t let that happen.
That is why they killed the V6 turbo Fiero. Faster than the Corvette C4, half the cost, and mid-engined…
Corporate greed is the reason we don’t get to have nice things at inexpensive prices. Price discrimination rules the day.
I’d say the 3800 is twice too big – I think the 1.9L SOHC and DOHC Saturn engines would have been more than up to the task and easier to package.
Space could certainly be an issue.
The LL0 1.9 I4 makes 124 horsepower. That would be enough power to exceed 170 mph in an EV1 with appropriate gearing thanks to the low drag. The car would possibly approach 60 mpg highway with that engine.
Here’s a video of the 133 horsepower electric EV1 setting a world record on a GM test track at 183 mph:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=699MzSBIcO4