Steal this car!

General Motors is by no means the only car company that has pulled back from electric vehicles. But the company has displayed a particularly ham-fisted approach all its own. When Honda yanked its EV Plus electric car, drivers persuaded the automaker to keep the existing cars on the road by modifying the lease to a month-to-month lease without warranty.

The EV1 drivers asked GM to do the same. Early this summer, 58 EV1 drivers sent checks to GM as proof that they wanted their leases to continue, petitioning the company to keep the EV1s on the road.

The checks, totaling more than $22,000, came back, uncashed, by registered mail in late June. "We're upset about them taking these working cars away even though we're willing to pay to keep using them," says Spertus. "My husband and I would like to buy ours, since in all likelihood GM is going to destroy these cars although they work great and don't pollute." GM has pledged to contribute some of the cars to museums, but the EV1 drivers are skeptical, since just how many museums out there really want an electric car?

"I can understand GM not wanting to make more EV1s since it's expensive, but why do they have to take away the EV1s that already exist?" says Spertus. She and some of the other EV1 drivers who had their checks sent back by GM are now donating the money to help fund the Production Electric Drivers Vehicle Coalition's legal action in the federal suit in California.

The EV1 drivers find themselves in the odd predicament of defending a vehicle that they don't own from a manufacturer who wants to kill it off. Seldon says of the recall: "It's a tragedy. Everyone I know who has leased it has been totally unwilling to let go of it. I'm convinced that GM didn't want the car to succeed." The EV1 driver points out that electric cars do not require the same kind of routine maintenance that combustion-engine cars and even hybrids do, like replacing mufflers, oil changes and smog checks.

Yet, even as General Motors and other car companies are turning away from the electric zero-emissions vehicles that they've put on the road, they're crowing about their new whiz-bang advances in fuel-cell technology, another zero-emission source that's still off in the misty future.

"These fuel cells that they're so happy about, they're probably only so happy about because they're perpetually 10 years way," says Hanssen, who as of March 2003 will convert from his EV1 to Toyota's Rav4 EV, a small electric SUV that's still available and can actually be purchased, not just leased.

As for Spertus, she's contemplating committing an act of "civil disobedience" to keep her tailpipe-free car cruising the Bay Area freeways. When her lease expires at the end of December this year, she's thinking about just not giving the car back.

But even the Sexiest Geek Alive is reluctant to risk going to jail for auto theft to save her electric car.

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