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.<p>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.<p>Everything is impossible because of lizard men until one day someone does it and then they were just lucky.
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.
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.<p>If the EV-1 had been allowed to succeed, who says we wouldn't have had lithium batteries sooner?
With so many discharge/recharge cycles common for a 105-mile range vehicle, how long would that NiMH battery last?
Who didn't allow it to succeed?
It's not obvious it would have succeeded, whatever meddling occurred. It's all a bit speculative.
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"?
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.
Either that, or the lizard people decided to start allowing them for some lizardy reason or other. That never really figures into these narratives.
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.<p>Just because they do it openly and often very stupidly doesn't stop it being a conspiracy.<p>This very article details this in relation to California regulations pushing for an EV:<p>>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.
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.<p>Edit: that's not to say incumbents are always big companies. They might be homeowners, or taxi drivers.
Similarly we see German automakers pushing against European regulations, even as China produces better cars cheaper that are zero emissions…
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.