>I was especially irked by listening to people who got sweetheart
> deals, leasing the EV1 for literally 1/4 of it's actual market value,
> bitching when that deal ended. Who the hell wouldn't want to lease a
> $65,000 car you
> never put gas in for only $300 a month? Since this absolutely could
> not be implemented on a large scale it came across as a bunch of
> privileged people whining when they had their wonderful but ultimately
> unsustainable privilege removed. [JT]
Yeah but people were not just asking to continue the same deal. They
were asking to buy the cars at market price. Incidentally the $65,000
price was based on what was basically a prototype. Mass production
would have brought that cost down. But even at $65,000 there were
plenty of rich people who wanted to buy them for the bragging rights
of owing a cool electric car. [GL]
Most of the people who drove them could not afford to shell out $65,000. At that price they would constitute a statistically insignificant portion of the automobile population anyway. I do not care if a handful of wealthy people can afford a boutique car that is many times more environmentally benign than current autos. It is the Ford Taurus, Chrylser minivan and Ford F-150 sized markets that needs to clean up, not the miniscule Ferrari, Porsche sized markets. Incidentially GM claims the prototype cost 1 billion dollars. An executive at GM said the actual production cost of the EV1 was ~$80,000. The $65,000 cost was what a friend of mine, who is an electrical engineer at D-M, said would be the absolute bottom line cost to produce something like it. Manufacturing cost only, not including development costs and certainly not selling price to be profitable. If you figure the R&D into the EV1's cost (as you really should) then the cost of each of the just over 1000 EV1's is still in excess of $900,000 each. Even if you sold them for $65,000 each you would need to sell far more of them in five years time than any other car has ever sold in the same amount of time to break even. It just wasn't possible for GM to break even on the EV1 regardless of how many they made. That is what really killed it.
> >Ni-MH batteries. Those batteries are toxic as hell.... replaced at
> ~50,000 miles . [JT]
Given how expensive the batteries are it would not be a big deal to
require manufacturers take back the batteries and recycle all toxic
components. And it has now been pretty widel demonstrated that Ni-MH
batteries can still run at 50% capacity after 500 cycles - which with
the Sunrise I mentioned would be more like 100,000 miles. At even at
100,000 miles the car would be a junker (with only a 100 mile range -
but quite drivable). It could still be used as the way junkers are
often used - for around town and short distance driving - which might
get you another 50,000 miles out of it. [GL]
You can say it's no big deal to recycle all the cell phone, PDA, etc. NiMH batteries just as easily but it isn't being done an a scale that makes a significant contribution to keeping them out of landfills today. Why should I believe that 5 or 7 years from now things would be so different with these car batteries. Look at how we dispose of car batteries and tires today for a better idea how we would handle the automotive NiMH batteries.
The key here is that none of these would be provided by a "free
market" economy. But since there is no such thing as a "free market"
that is not the same things as "would not work" or "are not ready".
What I don't like about the film is that it is too heavy on implying a
coordinated conspiracy - where everything it documents is pretty
easily explained by an attempt to force a technology on a powerful
industry that it did not want to adapt. No coordination was needed;
you can pretty much count on every major car company from GM to
Toyota acting the same way. [GL]
I was actually afraid the film was going to come across as more conspiratorial than it did so I was grateful for that. Mostly I just wanted the film to drive home the point that changes of the sort that we need will absolutely have to be government mandated. We absolutely cannot rely on market forces to provide the incentives to implement much needed change. The film was very light on this probably because the film makers believe in the power of the market to perform miracles.
John Thornton