Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

EVs touted by POTUS

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
The EV industry would have probably been a little further along by now if the CARB EV mandate hadn't been killed. The Bush administration helped kill it by siding with the automakers when they sued California to stop the mandate.

Personally, I'm not so sure a mandate was the right way to go. Nothing will generate as much resistance as telling people they HAVE to do something. It's much better if you can uses incentives and influence to convince them to do what you want.

Still, once the mandate was in place, and the EVs were already on the road, it seems that we would have all been better off if the program had continued. Certainly the way it ended, with most of the car companies taking back the cars and crushing them, was a disaster.

While the mandate was only in California, I think the car companies thought it was just a minor annoyance, but when it looked like it would spread to other states, it really scared them.

Now, a few years later, with oil prices much higher, EVs are back in the spotlight. I think this time they are here to stay.
 
I think they are here to stay too. It’s a perfect storm of oil prices, climate change, advances in battery technology and indirectly financing rogue groups.

Perfect storm indeed. My only real question is why, it seems, companies are reinventing the wheel. We all know GM pumped over $1b into the EV1 program...why couldn't they use the same darn car and figure out how to replace the components with better/ cheaper technology available today?
:confused:
 
DDB: I would say because retooling is expensive. If they can make a better product with the Volt than the EV1 was they can earn a lot more per unit with the Volt. Not to mention if they seem serious with the Volt program (which they do) they can still sell quite a lot of their current dinojuice-cars while they are shifting their organization around. That way when or if the Volt does sell well they will slowly convert all their cars to electric. This added time will also make it easier to demand a higher price for the electrics since they clearly had to do a lot of research for it to work.
It might also be that unless they wanted to relaunch an exact replica of the EV1 we are underestimating how much research/engineering there is to get all the details right. Look at the time both Tesla and Think are spending getting their EVs right and they got no dinojuice product lines to protect. They have all the motivation they need to get their EVs out the door.

Cobos
 
Perfect storm indeed. My only real question is why, it seems, companies are reinventing the wheel. We all know GM pumped over $1b into the EV1 program...why couldn't they use the same darn car and figure out how to replace the components with better/ cheaper technology available today?
:confused:

The people and tooling and parts supply chain for the EV1 are all long gone, and it wasn't really designed for true mass production to begin with. Putting the EV1 back into production would have taken as long and cost as much as designing a new and much improved car (the Chevy Volt / E-Flex platform) -- and the EV1's price and performance wouldn't be competitive against new EVs from Mitsubishi, Subaru, Think, Nissan & Renault, Toyota, Aptera, Phoenix, Tesla, etc.
 
The people and tooling and parts supply chain for the EV1 are all long gone, and it wasn't really designed for true mass production to begin with. Putting the EV1 back into production would have taken as long and cost as much as designing a new and much improved car (the Chevy Volt / E-Flex platform) -- and the EV1's price and performance wouldn't be competitive against new EVs from Mitsubishi, Subaru, Think, Nissan & Renault, Toyota, Aptera, Phoenix, Tesla, etc.


I have no clue how we'd test either of our theories. IMO it's a shame the blueprints for the EV1 are locked in a safe that nobody will ever see. I'm sure Tesla or other startups would find them interesting.