Legendary car flops
 

Legendary Car Flops- Yahoo! Autos Article Page

EV1 was unreliable?

I'd have to guess an experimental car would have it's share of problems. I have to kind of laugh at "low sales" since it was a leased car.

...I'm surprised they didn't mention the "...Unsafe At Any Speed..." Corvair (ha,ha).

...Edsel will forever be an automotive Albatross around Ford's neck, just as the Corvair is for Chevrolet.

Frank -

Low "sales" means flop in any book. I am guessing unreliable in terms of "range anxiety". I am reading "The Car that Could" and I haven't gotten to the point where the car was being "sold" and in the public's hands. Maybe I'll have some more reliability info at that point.

CarloSW2

Frank -

Wouldn't it be cool if a GM CEO said something like "We were wrong" and recreated an EV2.0? Whoops, I was in another dimension for a second. Won't happen again.

CarloSW2

How would they know? they only built 1,100 of them.

Oh? Then Porsche, Lotus, and Ferrari are all flops?

Besides, if I'm remembering correctly, the GM EV1 didn't have ANY sales. Weren't they leased to test drivers, and taken back at the end of the lease period, often over the vehement protests of the drivers?

jamesqf -

Yes, I was being subtle. I was intimating to texanidiot25's earlier post that EV1's were leased. That's why I used quotation marks when I typed "sales". Part of my post was nuanced in the sense that other people that are unlike us would judge the success of a car based on it's "bottom line" profit/loss to the company that produced it. As you and I have discussed in the past, this is a POV question with regards to the first Gen Honda Insight.

I don't think exoticars are good analogies in this discussion because EV1s were never sold at or above what they cost to make. And yes, EV1s were never "sold", period.

Question: Does anyone know the cost of EV1's when they were produced? Maybe I'll find out later in the book. How much did first Gen Insights cost to make?

CarloSW2

Yeah, I laughed at the "sales" comment too. :rolleyes:

What got my attention was the "unreliable" comment. I haven't really researched EV1s, but as noted above, I recall that the leasees were despondent when their cars were called back. :(

"EV2"- wouldn't that be nice? GM must have concluded it's a dead end... at least for these times...

P.S. Corvairs are awesome! :thumbup:

I'm going to go out on a limb and say 40k-50k, I recall it being a high number. Mainly due to the technology and the very limited production run. These were probably hand assembled instead of assembly-lined like mainstream models.

Exotic cars do not count in "low sales" because they are all limited production cars. They're point is low sales. ;)

Volt isn\'t EV2?