Car-sitters vs. Car-crushers

UPDATE: Saturday, March 5, 2005. GM successfully removed 5-6 EV1s from the Burbank storage area on Friday, but not without a brief confrontation with one vigiler blocking the truck, until Burbank police arrived. The truck was later involved in a freeway accident when the driver apparently hit a concrete medium, disabling the truck for 5-6 hours, at last report.

It's 3:30am, and I am sitting in front of the General Motors training facility in Burbank, a place most people don’t even know is here. From the front, it is innocuous enough- a wide brick building in a residential neighborhood, bearing the name and logo of the largest company in the world. Normally the gates to this facility are wide open during the week, but today the guards are just arriving for their 12-hour shift, guards that are only here because I am. It is day 14 of the 24/7 EV1 Vigil, otherwise known as the California GM Car-sit.

In 1996, General Motors debuted the EV1, the first mass-produced modern electric car, and their bid to meet the California Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. It was sleek and fast, completely dispelling the "EVs are golf carts" myth- a sporty little 2-seater that could take a Viper off the line and has a range up to 140 miles per charge… and it didn’t pollute. In short, the EV1 was good, clean, fun.

To bring the EV1 to market, General Motors hired 13 passionate young people as EV Specialists- "the Originals". I was one of these Specialists; at age 20, I was the youngest, and it was my dream job. The technology was amazing, the people fascinating and the potential intoxicating. We were responsible for leasing the vehicles to customers, working the Saturn retailers through which the EV1 was leased, designing and executing events, creating marketing materials – and for me, the line between job and life blurred further. I met and married an EV1 technician, and had my son Chris, who as a baby slept in EV1’s while they were up in the air with his dad working on them from underneath, and attended so many EV1 events that he became the unofficial mascot. What started as my own passion became a family project, and what once was just a car, had clearly become my life.

Eventually, when we ran out of cars to lease, the EV Specialists started a waiting list, not having any idea how controversial that move would become. "If there’s enough demand, General Motors would tell us, we will build you more cars." Problem was, they would never quantify just how many orders constituted "demand"- and so our list just kept growing with the names of people willing to wait an unknown period of time for the possibility of getting a car. Many of the people who were able to lease EV1s had to wait up to a year to do so.

Eventually, GM wouldn’t just settle for not building more cars, they wanted back the ones that had been leased, no matter how much their loyal drivers begged to keep them. Not only did they take them back, they laid off the EV Specialists and shipped the most environmental car ever to hit the road off to Mesa, Arizona and crushed them, after only a fraction of their useful life. And kept crushing them, until there were only 78 left in Burbank. And so began the California GM Car-sit.

A coalition of former EV1 drivers, current EV drivers and supporters, and environmental organizations makes up the coalition currently sitting vigil in front of General Motors in Burbank. And there’s me, one of the most enthusiastic employees GM ever had, but someone who also can’t sit by and watch them kill the car I’ve dedicated a third of my life to- and lie about why they’re doing it. Because as much as General Motors would like the government and the public to believe that there was no demand for the EV1, just the opposite was true.

General Motors claims that they could "only" lease 800 cars in 4 years, and that they shut down the program because it was an economic failure. The truth is GM only made 800 vehicles available. They ignored the Specialists’ and the public’s pleas for more, and sued the State of California to get rid of the California mandate. But they’ll tell you in their sincerest Midwestern accent that they tried as hard as they could to make a business out of it.

A few days ago, we vigilers decided to test the "no demand" theory. We asked whether anyone would be willing to purchase one of the incarcerated Burbank EV1s for $24,671.60, which is the residual price stated in the original EV1 lease. As these are six year-old cars, these cars would have no warranty, and we are willing to release GM from all liability relating to parts or service. We received over 80 orders in 48 hours. On Saturday, February 26- day 11 of the vigil, we held a rally to announce our offer of approximately $1.9 million to purchase the EV1s that have "no demand." Adding that to the $18,000 in lease payments and up to $13,000 in public tax money they have already received on each car, General Motors will have been paid or offered up to $56,000 each, on cars that cost only $44,000 in the first place , negating their argument that they couldn’t make a profit on electric vehicles. As we await an answer, we continue our round-the-clock watch over the EV1s.

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