G.M.: Guilty Motives?

Recently in class, we watched a documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car, on the experimentation and consequent destruction of a General Motors electric car named the EV1. According to the documentary, a number of Californians were leased the car in the late 1990’s for real world experimental purposes. After a brief stint on the road, the cars were snatched up by General Motors, and almost all were destroyed. The documentary presented several of the “test drivers” and their discontent with General Motors’ actions. Many of these test drivers had found complete satisfaction with the EV1 and were quite puzzled when General Motors prohibited them from purchasing their electric cars. The film then insinuated that the EV1 was destroyed due to ulterior motives, more specifically: evil oil and car companies colluded to stop production of the electric car in order to ensure maximum profit for the oil companies. While the movie may suggest this, I would like to offer a possible explanation to why production of the EV1 was really terminated.

For one, General Motors stated that the demand for the car was not great enough to support its production and sale. The film attempts to depose this idea with interviews from former owners of the EV1. Each owner enthusiastically supported the car, and a number of them had actually created a protest group to bring it back. As convincing an argument as these people may make, they do not represent the American domestic automobile market in the least. All of them are Californians who voluntarily signed up to test an electric car. Their opinions, as a group, cannot be extrapolated to the greater public. Furthermore, the only group that truly had a grasp on the car’s potential demand is probably GM itself who spends millions of dollars a year testing automobile market demand. The fact is that the car was extremely expensive to produce and market demand did not justify its production. According to GM product development czar Bob Lutz, “they [EV1’s] cost us well over $80,000 to produce, and, being a two-seater, we could only sell 800 in four years. We lost over one billion dollars on that experiment." If GM were looking to save the environment, it would have continued selling the EV1’s; but, GM exists to produce profits and returns for its shareholders. For this reason, the EV1 was not continued. However, looking at GM’s current economic prospects, who knows if a little more research into the EV1 technology could have altered their current fate.