... Gas-Powered Cars

As Honda rolls out a lease program in Southern California for its new FCX Clarity hydrogen powered vehicle, one can not resist but to draw analogies with an almost forgotten saga of GM’s EV1.

Back in 1997 GM introduced our generation’s Existing Alternative to gas powered vehicles – fully electric plug-in car.
It is hard to imagine that the technology which could have allowed us to curb emissions and lower our reliance on foreign oil existed and was more than fully functional over 10 years ago.
A great film “Who Killed the Electric Car” documents the last years of that great engineering achievement.


While the movies premise of pinning the fault of the project failure (hence the name) is pretty lame, the information contained within is priceless.
All 457 cars were easily leased out (not sold), all in California, huge waiting lists were generated, all drivers were instant fans, and yet it was not enough to render the project sustainable for GM, which killed the project recalled all the vehicles and … crushed them.

These days there are plenty of Existing “grassroots” Alternatives to the gas powered vehicles, Wikipedia maintains a long list of those, headed by the best car of all times Tesla Roadster, but it did take the big automakers more than 10 years to get back to the market with a new viable alternative.
Makes you wonder how long Honda's one will last.