Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
General Motors wants to take its pioneering electric automobiles off the road. But the geeks who drive them won't let go of the steering wheel.
Sep 4, 2002 | In stop-and-go traffic on Highway 101 here, Ellen Spertus, the 2001 "Sexiest Geek Alive," mock-apologizes for the ambient air pollution: "Sorry about the smog. But it's not our fault. This car doesn't even have a tailpipe."
Spertus' silver-blue, two-door sports car, which does zero to 30 in fewer than three seconds, doesn't have a gas tank or a key either. It's a 1999 EV1, an electric car that Spertus, a computer science professor at Mills College in Oakland, and her husband, Keith Golden, a rocket scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in nearby Mountain View, charge up every night at home in their garage in San Francisco.
For the computer scientist and the rocket scientist, the EV1 is a kind of geek Batmobile. Professor Spertus even uses her EV1 in the lesson plans for her operating-systems course, when her students study computer security. Instead of a key, a numeric code unlocks the door and starts the engine. The students' homework assignment: Break into the prof's car.
An MIT computer science Ph.D. whose geek cred includes having been known to wear a slide rule strapped to her thigh in a holster, Spertus is about to be stripped of her favorite new technology, along with hundreds of other engineers and environmentalists who drive these futuristic zero-emission vehicles.
"They're the cleanest cars ever made, and they want to take them off the road. It just baffles," says Greg Hanssen, an EV1 driver who is co-chairman of the Production Electric Vehicles Drivers Coalition, a group of electric-car drivers lobbying to keep the cars on the road.
In February, General Motors sent a letter to its EV1 drivers, informing them that the car company had decided not to renew the car's three-year leases when they expire, mostly later this year. (In 1997, GM produced 660 first-generation EV1's, followed by 500 more in 1999, according to Spertus, but many of the second generation went to replace the first, which had been recalled because of a safety issue.)
GM and other automakers have long argued that electric cars are not economically feasible or marketable; they maintain that no one, outside of a few technophiles and environmentalists, wants to drive a battery-powered car that needs to be charged about every 100 miles. Just last Friday, Ford announced that it would discontinue its electric car, Th!nk.
Testifying before the California Air Resources Board on Sept. 7, 2000, Sam Leonard, director of the General Motors Public Policy Center, said that the automaker had invested almost a billion dollars in electric-car technology and production, and had expected to manufacture 10 to 20 times the cars that they ended up seeing demand for: "The electric-vehicle market failed to materialize, not for lack of effort but for lack of customers willing to sacrifice the utility of today's gasoline-powered vehicles," he said.
But the EV1 drivers, many of whom sat on waiting lists for months to get an electric car, say that's just so much spin. They claim that the car company says there's no demand, because it wants to prove that it can't possibly meet California's strict emissions regulations. (New York and Massachusetts are also considering similar mandates; combined with California's, they could bring lower emissions requirements to one-fifth of the American auto market.)
At the same time as it is quietly killing off the EV1, General Motors has recently announced that in order to meet the California regulations, it will give away thousands of so-called "neighborhood electric vehicles." EV1 drivers say the neighborhood cars, which have more in common with golf carts than cars, and are only safe at speeds of about 25 mph, just serve to reinforce the public's misconception that electric cars are little more than glorified toys that will never replace gas guzzlers.
"I don't expect that we'll be able to save the EV1," says Spertus, who has helped organize EV1 drivers online who are rallying to keep their cars. "I just don't want the car companies to get away with claiming that electric cars are no good and nobody wants them."
Get Salon in your mailbox!