The Revenge of Electric Car

I was reading this very interesting story on Time Magazine's website, whether US government should save the General Motors. Although there is a lot of media speculation about the Detroit's big three falling apart, but, in absence of a bail out package, the General motors will fallout first and will have the biggest impact on the US auto market. 

Why General motors'? because Ford is not in that bad condition and Chrysler is not that big. So the only one remaining is General Motors (GM). Ford and Chrysler may also go bankrupt, but, they definitely aren't the first one to go. 

The article on Time Magazine's website went on discussing the financial problems of GM and it finally concluded that a falling GM will have a devastating impact on US economy. Whether  the government wants or not it will have to cough up some money to GM. The only choice government has is, whether it want to pay for GM's survival or it want to pay for GM's funeral. 

Well, amidst all these discussions I rolled over to the typical behaviour exhibited by Economists and started thinking what GM could have done in past that would have perhaps prevented the current situation. After all, its not credit crunch that has affected GM, there are Toyotas and Hondas who are still surviving. While i was thinking on these lines, I came a across the following web page on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car

The following excerpt taken from Wikipedia, describes what this page is all about, 

"Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology."

I really wasn't aware of the existance of this documentary and I definitely never had a chance to watch it. However, this page made me a little bit more curious about this electric car, whose murder we are talking aobut. 

So after doing some more search, I found another page on Time Magazine's website, which describes the General Motors EV1, using the following Words, and somehow decides to put this Car in the category of "The 50 Worst Cars of All Time".

"The EV1 was a marvel of engineering, absolutely the best electric vehicle anyone had ever seen. Built by GM to comply with California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate, the EV1 was quick, fun, and reliable. It held out the promise that soon electric cars — charged from the grid with all sorts of groovy power sources, like wind and solar — could replace the smelly old internal-combustion vehicle."

Anyways, Time Magazine, had its owen reasons to classify this car into the category of the worst cars and I am no car technology expert to argue against this opinion. Whether, it was a lack of consumer confidence or a conspiracy, that killed the electric car, but surley GM missed the biggest oppotunity of its corporate life. GM decided not to produce any more EV1s and stopped developing the technology. 

Had GM not killed the electric car back than, i guess the situation would have been much different for GM now. Where exaclty are we in Electric car technology ? Well ..almost nowhere !! Even hybrid thechnology is nowhere near in that stage of development where a mainstream consumer can buy a hybrid car. Had GM not dumped this technology 10 years back,worked on developing this technology inspite of some initial market setbacks, the Electric car made by GM would have been 10 years more advanced than the current technology and instead of begging for bailout and loosing its market share to Toyota, the situation would have been much different for GM!!

However, that never happend and hence taxpayers will have to pay for either GM's life support (I wonder for how long one can keep GM alive like that) or for its funeral. On a more general note, what GM failed to realise is the importance of innovation in corporate sucess. Making cars just more flashy, sexy and stylish can't  get you anywhere in the long run. Current corporate sucess are full of examples where market appriacated innovation. Look at Apple, Google or the technology that lets me write these free blog posts.