GM set to announce plug-in hybrid vehicle

GM looks to be dipping its toes back into EV1 territory, with Reuters reporting that the still-number-one automaker is set to unveil a prototype plug-in hybrid vehicle at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this January. For its part, however, GM is keeping any details on the vehicle under wraps, no doubt content to let the inevitable hype machine run its natural course. The mystery ride would be the first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) from a major auto manufacturer, filling in the middle ground between the infamously-defunct all-electric car and the current enviro-friendly vehicles of choice: hybrids. Unlike a Prius or other hybrid, a PHEV can recharge its batteries from a regular household outlet -- yet unlike the EV1, it can fall back on a diesel or gasoline engine when the batts run dry. Those looking for fix in the shorter term, however, can of course already upgrade their hybrid to the plug-in variety, albeit for a hefty price.

[Via Autoblog Green]

[Intrepid @ Nov 14th 2006 5:06AM]

AWESOME!

[Totalfixation @ Nov 14th 2006 5:20AM]

"The EV1 was introduced at the 1997 Los Angeles Auto Show and leased to selected customers. But GM pulled the plug on the project in 2002, citing insufficient public support."

I remember hearing back that these cars were leased out only. which makes sense why this car had little public support.

[gear @ Nov 14th 2006 5:25AM]

Too bad they don't cover the roofs of these cars with solar panels. Seems like a logical idea.

[Rohit Kapur @ Nov 14th 2006 5:40AM]

Hmm... You know what, that really doesn't sound like a bad idea!

[Revrant2394 @ Nov 14th 2006 6:51AM]

Oh boy, obscure joke.

Here goes

"Whatever you say, Wayne Szalinski."

Oh, oh ho ho, obscure jokes.

[Grizz @ Nov 14th 2006 8:19AM]

And because it supports recharging straight from the factory, you can use any solar setup you desire. If this catches on, expect to see a bunch of "solar sail" roof racks on the market.

[kerry beauchrt @ Nov 14th 2006 8:26AM]

"I remember hearing back that these cars were leased out only. which makes sense why this car had little public support."
The ignorance about the EV1 is the main reason "Who Killed the Electric Car?" hasn't been vilified as pure lying trash. The EV1 was leased for two reasons : 1) the car did not meet the new FederalHighway safety standards introduced after the car was designed but before it went to market, which led to negotiations in which the Feds allowed the car to be built and leased only in "experimental numbers" and the cars recovered by GM at the end of the leasing period and 2) the car cost GM $44,000 to build, and no fool would pay thatprice for what amounted to a grocery-getter and short commuter vehicle that went thru $5,000 worth of batteries a year. Only
the diehard well-heeled environmentalists could
put up with the inconveniences of a car like the EV1 and then lie about how wonderful the acar was. The EV1 should never have been put on the market. The car was a piece of crap.

[stormc @ Nov 15th 2006 8:07PM]

Right. Such a terrible car that the owners were sueing GM to try to buy them. The cars they crushed were already built. GM would have invested nothing to sell them except lawyers cost to draft an "as is" bill of sale.

They had buyers with cash in hand. Whether the cars were good or bad is irrelevant to the discussion. They could have been sold. GM chose to remove them from the market. Personally I think it was to avoid making the other crap they were (are) selling look bad.
storm

[Will @ Nov 14th 2006 9:17AM]

Wouldn't it be brilliant if GM was actually working on this for the last 10 years and the whole hydrogen car hoax was just a diversion to throw everyone off?? That would be so "in yo' face" to Toyota! Not that I'm a big GM fan, but I don't want to see them go out of business either.

[Mrfreezie @ Nov 14th 2006 10:14AM]

Lol, I would love a plug in hybrid. I could pull up to quik trip or 711 and just plug it in. Why pay for gas when I can get free electricity?

[bifnasty @ Nov 14th 2006 1:27PM]

Yeah, electricity is free.............it just come out of the socket magically and does not cost a thing.

[TIMMAH! @ Nov 14th 2006 11:02AM]

"The ignorance about the EV1 is the main reason "Who Killed the Electric Car?" hasn't been vilified as pure lying trash. The EV1 was leased for two reasons : 1) the car did not meet the new FederalHighway safety standards introduced after the car was designed but before it went to market, which led to negotiations in which the Feds allowed the car to be built and leased only in "experimental numbers" and the cars recovered by GM at the end of the leasing period and 2) the car cost GM $44,000 to build, and no fool would pay thatprice for what amounted to a grocery-getter and short commuter vehicle that went thru $5,000 worth of batteries a year. Only the diehard well-heeled environmentalists could put up with the inconveniences of a car like the EV1 and then lie about how wonderful the acar was. The EV1 should never have been put on the market. The car was a piece of crap."

That doesn't explain why Toyota followed the same leasing/destruction model with the RAV4 EV and the dealership insiders that say they were not being allowed to sell the car despite demand.

[b00da @ Nov 14th 2006 11:06AM]

You're right, guys. All of the thousands of engineers working at GM and Ford for the last few decades have never, ever thought about putting solar panels on the roof and have never, ever tried it to see if it was actually viable.

Thank god there are Engadget commenters who can think of such revolutionary ideas and save us all from extinction.

[Brendon @ Nov 14th 2006 11:59AM]

They didn't foresee fuel economy becoming a huge selling point.

[Gaget Extremist @ Nov 15th 2006 5:50AM]

I remember it like it happened yesterday and back in the day. I followed this story like the bible.

In 1987, GM blanketed solar panels on the back of a car called the GM Sunraycer, it won a race accross Austrialia and beat out scores of other cars.

http://www.speedace.info/sunraycer_general_motors.htm

GM for as long as I can remember, has had been trying to some degree to come up with fossil fuel replacements.

More information on the solar cars of 1987.

http://www.speedace.info/solar_car_pioneer_denis_bartel.htm
http://www.historysmiths.com.au/CentFedPlayKit/events/Advance/1987_solar-powered%20car%20race.htm

[andy @ Nov 14th 2006 12:21PM]

battery technology was not ready for the EV1. Things have changed.

A new version of these suckers is prime for people with those 20-30 mile drives to work. That just go to work and then come home and use the wife's minivan to take the family places at night.

It would obviously have to be cheap though. Similar things are catching on in rich neighborhoods to run to the corner store or whatnot. It's more of a novelty than anything else to them, but add some more range and make it look more like a car and there may be something here.

[mathew @ Nov 14th 2006 12:37PM]

The key word in the original article is "prototype".

As in "this is just some idea a bunch of our engineers came up with, don't ever expect us to actually sell a hybrid car".

GM has hybrids, yeah, but they're all trucks or buses. Their official line is still that hybrid cars don't make sense.

[SherryB @ Nov 14th 2006 1:47PM]

The GM plug-in hybrid most likely will be based on Saab's 9-3 BioPower Hybrid, a plug-in hybrid shown by Saab (a division of GM) last Spring in Sweden. The original pres release about the Saab car described its plug-in capabilities, but that portion was edited out in subsequent versions.

Many automakers have been working on plug-in hybrids in the past decade. GM even made a plug-in hybrid version of its EV1. Toyota has a plug-in Prius. Volvo began building a fleet of plug-in hybrids but that program was shut down by Ford when it bought Volvo in 1998.

See details in my new book, Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that Will Recharge America (New Society Publshers). It'll be in bookstores in Dec. but is available as of just this week on my website, www.sherryboschert.com.

As for the all-electric cars of the past decade, ALL the makers leased them (GM, Toyota, Ford, Honda, Nissan), then sued California to get rid of the clean-air regulations, succeeded in 2003, and began recalling the cars and destroying them despite pleas to sell them and waiting lists of customers. Protests saved around 1,000 electric vehicles. I still drive one that's a great regional car (a Toyota RAV4-EV). It's not uncommon for me to drive 200 miles in a day without waiting around even one minute for the car to charge. I haven't been to a gas station in 4 years. I've got 54,000 miles on the car. The batteries are as good as new and ar expected to last the life of the car.

[Don Remley @ Jul 18th 2007 5:46AM]

What ever happened to the hybrid project that Bill Lear was working on before he died?

[SherryB @ Nov 14th 2006 1:54PM]

Driving an average car on gasoline at $2.50/gallon costs about 13 cents/mile. Driving an average EV on electricity at the national average of 9 cents/kWh costs about 2 cents/mile.

Other data show that driving on electricity is a lot less pollulting, too, even on today's 50%-coal U.S. grid.

[tom @ Nov 14th 2006 10:24PM]

I remember reading that the Japanese version of the Prius does "plug-in" so it can recharge it's batteries. That feature is disbabled for the US version because it was thought that US consumers wouldn't buy cars the "had to be plugged-in" (a la "Who Killed the Electric Car").

If use "the Google", I'm sure you'll find instructions on how to hack your Prius to enable the plug-in feature.

[Murc @ Nov 14th 2006 10:54PM]

solar panels on the roof is just stupid, there not all that efficient and they cost a lot, If your battery has enough juice to power you electric vehicle in the middle of summer on a hit day, you might get an extra 3-5 minutes worth of juice.....its just not worth it.

**GOD DAMN BIRDS STOP SHITIN ON MY RIDE, YOUR LOWERING ITS EFFICIENCY!**

[elbow @ Nov 16th 2006 1:25AM]

Hi tom,

I own a Prius, and I'm 99% sure that the feature that the US version has disabled is not plug-in ability, rather a dashboard switch called "EV mode." This is intended for situations where you just want to move the car a very short distance (like, to repark it on the same block), and would prefer that the gas engine not turn on, mostly to reduce tailpipe emissions. The batteries on the current Prius aren't intended to let it run further than that, they're really just a fairly short-range buffer.

The Prius plug-in conversions are so expensive ($5k-12k) because it requires a pack of many high-efficiency batteries whose cost hasn't yet been driven down by really big mass production.

The next-gen Prius is supposed to have a better battery pack, as well as a turbo gas engine, for 90+ (rated) MPG, and supposedly Toyota's committed to having it be plug-in-optional, too.


Hi Gaget Extremist,

I helped build a solar race car in college a la the Sunraycer, and there are a lot of things that need to be done differently, so that the end result is a lot more like a huge recumbent bike than a car. Because solar cells really aren't that efficient, the whole thing needs to be able to run on roughly the power of a hair drier, which is orders of magnitude less than what a typical car needs. The whole Sunraycer, while almost 20 feet long & over 6 feet wide, weighed only 360 lb! Even so, teams are typically allowed to additionally charge the solar racecars before & after each day's race, to build up an extra reserve in the batteries (just the sunlight falling on the cells while driving is usually still not enough). And god help you if you get in an accident in one, at that weight, it ain't exactly crash-worthy...

[scott @ Nov 16th 2006 11:47AM]

Who Killed the Electric Car? :

http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?trkid=73&movieid=70052424

[Mike Tieman @ Nov 28th 2006 11:48PM]

Very interesting web site www.omnivalves.com they contend that their new technology will make hybrids tecnology soon obsolete. Automobiles with their intake valve do better then hybrids, with out all the expensive batteries and electric motors...... ???

[Heartshot88 @ Dec 7th 2006 8:43PM]

Wouldn't we end our dependence on foreign oil, drive the cost of ethanol down, reduce harmful emissions, and all of the other good stuff if we built this plug-in hybrid vehicle with an E-85 turbo engine? I have not yet seen the E-85 mentioned in the plug-in discussion, but seems to me that we could produce the other 15% domestically. Then I have a grocery getter and an over-the-road vehicle in one neat little package, and all the little (trying not to be mean hear) "oil producers" around the world rushing to us to buy our products.