EV-1 for Lease (1996)

2/1/2026 at 4:40:48 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uep5zOrsAEA

Incredible documentary about the politics around EV's made before Tesla's became mainstream.

People were demanding and protesting asking GM to let time buy their EV'1 after the lease, but they destroyed all the cars. So did Toyota for the EV RAV4's.

by creativeSlumber

2/2/2026 at 3:41:41 PM

I drove a electric Rav4, but couldn't stomach the 40 mile range for the price. But it was a fun car, and it seemed huge (compared to my miata).

by baldeagle

2/1/2026 at 3:44:38 AM

Inflation from December 1996 to today makes the $500/mo equivalent to $1000/mo.

by themafia

2/2/2026 at 9:50:58 AM

I'm surprised that no one has tried to clone this car. There are replicas of older cars such as older Porsches, Shelbys and others but I can see a small market for people who would want a replica EV-1

by oldnetguy

2/1/2026 at 3:32:30 PM

Wild to see this name again.

I went to school in the metro Detroit area, and I still remember when GM brought an EV1 prototype to my middle school.

They seemed so excited about it, I was shocked to hear it got shelved when it did.

by xmcp123

2/1/2026 at 7:37:58 AM

It’s fascinating to me to watch how pre-BEVs-being-normal they were supposedly impossible to build because Big Auto was lobbying the government and buying the tech and shutting it down. I remember how Reddit would talk about this: GM doesn’t want any competition because they collude with oil companies and so on.

After BEVs became normal, the guys who made them common are supposedly just idiots who got lucky. Presumably history will write LLM inventors as lucky morons as well. And space rocket manufacturers and GLP-1 (and associated) drug makers.

Everything is impossible because of lizard men until one day someone does it and then they were just lucky.

by renewiltord

2/1/2026 at 9:18:04 AM

The EV-1 was launched with lead-acid batteries and later upgraded to NiMH. It would still not be possible to make a practial BEV with these battery chemistries. The breakthrough came through the microelectronics industry producing billions of cheap devices with lithium ion batteries in them.

by fsh

2/1/2026 at 11:00:15 AM

The EPA range of the NiMH EV-1 was 105 miles. That was, and is, sufficient for a good proportion of real-world use cases.

If the EV-1 had been allowed to succeed, who says we wouldn't have had lithium batteries sooner?

by gnfargbl

2/2/2026 at 12:18:39 AM

It's sufficient in the same way 1991 Ford Escort that needs every fluid checked every gas stop is "sufficient" for most commuting in the present day.

Just because you can make it work with a lot of care doesn't mean that most consumers don't want more.

by cucumber3732842

2/1/2026 at 12:43:22 PM

With so many discharge/recharge cycles common for a 105-mile range vehicle, how long would that NiMH battery last?

by necovek

2/1/2026 at 1:02:03 PM

this[0] page makes it seem 500~1000 cycles till 80% starting performance is common. So if you were charging it every other day from a 40~50 mile round trip commute, after 3~5 years you'd go to charging it every day.

[0]https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/articles/battery-articles/pr...

by wolfram74

2/3/2026 at 10:23:26 AM

As described there, this assumes slow overnight charging, and latest generation of batteries (not sure how viable that was the time of EV1).

Even LiOn batteries have charging patterns as the blocker to adoption, which means that practically, you'd get cars with less than 50% capacity by 2 years.

by necovek

2/1/2026 at 6:20:05 PM

I mean 3-5 years doesn't sound that great to me since I've kept every car longer then that.

However, it's not like the lead went anywhere so recycling your batteries for new ones every 5 years could be very practical.

by lesuorac

2/1/2026 at 10:28:05 PM

Also, not like it just keels over and dies, that's just the 80% performance criteria. Most people wouldn't need to replace the batteries at that point.

by wolfram74

2/1/2026 at 11:33:52 AM

It's not obvious it would have succeeded, whatever meddling occurred. It's all a bit speculative.

by rcxdude

2/1/2026 at 12:45:53 PM

Who didn't allow it to succeed?

by Wolfenstein98k

2/1/2026 at 1:12:12 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

> Mobil and other oil companies are also shown to be advertising directly against electric cars in national publications, [...] Chevron bought patents and a controlling interest in Ovonics, the advanced battery company featured in the film, ostensibly to prevent modern NiMH batteries from being used in non-hybrid electric cars.

> car makers engaged in both positive and negative marketing of the electric car [...] In later days it ran "award-winning" doomsday-style advertising featuring the EV1 and ran customer surveys which emphasized drawbacks to electronic vehicle technology

> the federal government of the United States under the Presidency of George W. Bush joined the auto-industry suit against California in 2002. This pushed California to abandon its ZEV mandate regulation.

> A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them. A few were disabled and given to museums and universities, but almost all were found to have been crushed. GM never responded to the EV drivers' offer to pay the residual lease value; $1.9 million was offered for the remaining 78 cars in Burbank, California before they were crushed.

by michaelt

2/2/2026 at 12:20:35 AM

Lithium ion batteries existed in the 90s and were being explored for BEV use by Nissan in 1996. They were already fairly ubiquitous in consumer electronics, at least high end ones, at the time the EV-1 was killed.

GM just tapped out too early because despite the cars being incredibly popular, they didn't want the short-term hit to the books that a niche product full of brand new technology represents.

by wpm

2/1/2026 at 11:36:45 AM

What's the narrative around the "idiots who got lucky" part, more specifically? I don't think I've heard this argument (in fact I thought the idea of Tesla of making a sporty electric car was a pretty damn savvy one). Is this just the general hatred of Musk (who, to be clear, didn't come up with this idea, but did buy into it early on) turning into irrational "everything he's done that's good must have been by accident"?

by rcxdude

2/1/2026 at 2:01:29 PM

I have certainly encountered variations on it from multiple technologies. There does seem to be a perception amongst younger people that electric cars are just a thing who's time has come. Without seeing the struggles that people went through to make that time come, it is quite easy to see how someone could miss that being in the right place at the right time happened because of the effort it took for there to be a right place and right time.

Specifically with Elon Muck, media coverage and public opinion are a mass of contradictions. He's the man single handedly destroying his businesses as he is on-track to becoming the worlds first trillionaire. He's just taking credit for the effort of the hard working and clever people who work from him, while seemingly being personally responsible for any incident that occurs.

I realise the man is a walking bag of neuroses with a can-do attitude, but I sometimes wish publications would restrict their reporting to the bad(and indeed good if he decides to do that again) things he actually does, rather than run mutually exclusive accusations.

by Lerc

2/1/2026 at 8:54:11 AM

Isn't it remarkable how much less bitter even the tone of the text in the transcripts are too? This is from far before Citizens United. They talk about it with almost idle fascination.

by CSSer

2/1/2026 at 1:17:26 PM

It’s got the tone of public radio, which I think this reporting was from.

by uxp100

2/1/2026 at 12:06:14 PM

Either that, or the lizard people decided to start allowing them for some lizardy reason or other. That never really figures into these narratives.

by HPsquared

2/1/2026 at 1:44:54 PM

Well the lizard people control not only all the oil but also all of the rare-earths so to them its a win-win.

by t1234s

2/1/2026 at 8:50:17 AM

Except big oil is still lobbying incredibly hard against them, enough to make people worry that the US will fall behind the curve on this tech and being a key explanation of why China has taken a lead on this tech.

Just because they do it openly and often very stupidly doesn't stop it being a conspiracy.

This very article details this in relation to California regulations pushing for an EV:

>They didn't like it. So all 3 American car makers, including GM, rallied together, spent a lot of money lobbying, also did this in partnership with the oil companies, I'm sorry to say. The oil companies spent far more than the car companies. And the result was that they got this mandate ordered down, delayed, pushed aside last December. And at that point Ford and Chrysler and the other carmakers no doubt heaved huge sighs of relief and thought great, now we don't have to worry about electrics for at least another 5 years. And that was when GM startled them by saying that it had secretly revived the EV-1, and would be coming out with it this fall. So Ford and Chrysler are if anything angrier at GM, because now that this car's going to be a reality, if it succeeds they've got to compete with it.

by ZeroGravitas

2/1/2026 at 9:22:59 AM

Similarly we see German automakers pushing against European regulations, even as China produces better cars cheaper that are zero emissions…

by CalRobert

2/1/2026 at 12:09:41 PM

It's a general problem across all sectors. Incumbent interests trying (and often succeeding) to block competition. The housing and healthcare markets are prime examples.

Edit: that's not to say incumbents are always big companies. They might be homeowners, or taxi drivers.

by HPsquared

2/1/2026 at 6:56:42 PM

> worry that the US will fall behind the curve

Man it's already over. It's hard to imagine the US autos EVER catching up at this point, even with state support.

by nharada

2/1/2026 at 12:12:44 PM

There is no evidence that the EV1 was a practical vehicle, at least not if you take the strange step of expecting GM to make money manufacturing it.

by maxerickson

2/1/2026 at 3:00:27 PM

one more example, the ULA CEOs laughing about how it was impossible to land a rocket back down and re-use it. Or car companies fighting unleaded gas.

by fred_is_fred