Someone Left Their GM EV1 to Die in a Parking Garage
The infamous EV1 from General Motors made history in the 1990s as the first mass-produced electric car of the modern era. However, it was only available through a three-month lease in select U.S. markets, with customers required to return the cars to GM following their “real-world engineering evaluation.”
When the project was cancelled at the turn of the new millennium due to excessively high R&D and production costs, GM repossesed leased EV1s and destroyed them.
Well, not all of them. One example was donated to the Smithsonian Institute and a few more wound up overseas. And then there’s this one that’s been sitting in a parking garage for many years.
Where, exactly? The contributor for The Drive who took these pictures wouldn’t say—no doubt to prevent the car from going to the crusher—but the location appears to be Alabama according to Carbuzz. Others claim it’s the same EV1 that was caught in Atlanta in 2016.
The car is covered in dust and the licence plate was wisely removed.
This is all pretty strange because it looks to be in top shape and could be worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars as a collector’s car. We don’t know if the electric motor and battery are still under the body, though.
As a reminder, the GM EV1 was a two-seat, two-door electric car with an extremely low drag coefficient. Early models offered a range of 90 kilometres, but the addition of a new battery later increased that number to 160 kilometres. Only 1,117 were built and around 800 of them found a taker.