On 13 Dec 2014 at 12:48, Ed Blackmond via EV wrote: > I did like the Honda EVPlus better. It did have 100 mile real world > range which lasted without noticeable degradation for six years.
IMO, the EV Plus was a rather well developed EV. The key to its stable (if rather staid) performance was the NiMH battery. Same with the original Toyota RAV4-EV; over a decade later, several examples ot the latter are still running round on their original Panasonic NiMH batteries, with well over 100k miles on them. The Nissan Altra EV from the late 1990s had a lithium battery. IIRC, about 120 were built. Does anyone know of any Altras still in use? I believe they were mostly sold (or leased?) to electric utilities. I never heard what happened to them. > Then they took it back. And they trashed it, I'm sorry to say. Honda kept a few EV Plus specimens to use for tinkering with fuel cells, but from what I can tell, most were crushed. AFAIK they didn't surplus them out for parts, which is a shame. We hobbyists might have made good use of them. Honda aren't alone. Several automakers executed their limited-production EVs of the 1990s with alarming alacrity. The sad stacks of crushed GM EV-1s stand in testimony to this. Partly thanks to the devotion that EV-1s inspired among their lessees; their senseless destruction was pretty well documented and photographed. GM is infamous for the destruction of the EV-1s, but other automakers did much the same, if less publicly. Surprisingly, GM themselves allowed about 12% of their nearly 500 S10-EV pickups to slip through the crusher jaws. These trucks were sold, not leased; it was a fleet vehicle and some customers insisted on purchase. So a few of these pickups (front wheel drive!) survived intact. But only a few of the EV-1s are still around. They were donated to museums and universities. GM removed the batteries and vandalized the drive systems, so they're difficult if not impossible to get running, though I think Brigham Young University managed to get theirs working. (They raced it for a few years; where is it now, I wonder?) Toyota gets some credit for caving and allowing their RAV4-EV lessees to buy the EVs, but many (perhaps most) of them were taken back and destroyed before Toyota was shamed into offering to let folks keep them. Pivco (later known as Think Mobility) reportedly could hardly wait to crush the few dozen Citybees used in the Alameda Station Car project. (Some of the commuters who had driven them wept when the flatbed came to take them away.) I heard that some of the US EV engineers involved with that project were racing against Pivco's unseemly haste, trying to save batteries and components. I didn't get the impression that they were very successful. As an aside, it should be said that there are significant downsides to keeping one of these highly proprietary automakers' EVs on the road. Spare parts availability can be a problem. They are mostly closed systems, so in order to fix much of the electronics, you have to start by reverse- engineering the system. Hobbyist EVs and conversions may have rougher edges, but they're much more open and easier to work on. Back to the point. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it seems to me that there's something disturbing going on with the deliberate destruction of these limited-production EVs. I know, the manufacturers don't want to have to support them, but I think it goes beyond that. The same attitude has surfaced again in different forms in the last few years. We now have the "coal rollers." There was also quite a bit of discussion about video clips of Aptera employees trashing prototype bodies. A vieo clip of recalled Zap Xebra EVs being crushed was rather gleefully circulated on the net, too. Smash 'em! Among true-blooded ICE-heads, there seems to still be a visceral hatred toward EVs. They just love to (both figuratively and literally) trash EVs, and to watch and read and hear others trash them. It's not surprising, I guess, but it's still a little unsettling. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
