Featured The Story Behind the Birth of the Prius

thank you for the reminder @Trollbait,
we forgot some of other S-10 EV fun facts (which only makes sense - as far as economic R&D goes). The S-10ev had the same guts & evolution as the EV1 ... both initially entering production with inefficient/heavy lead batteries, then switching to Ovionic's much more efficient nickel metal hydride. Sadly, GM refused to promote the new chemistry - which lead to it's biggest promoter, Stan Ovshinsky,
Stanford Ovshinsky dies at 89; inventor founded new field of electronics - LA Times
(his company, Ovionics) using his own money to advertise the better range chemistry. Almost laughable, a legal injunction was brought about, to stop him from the promotion of his large format nickel chemistry in both the original Toyota RAV4-EV as well as the EV1 & S-10ev pickup. The smaller nickel metal hydride formatted batteries are still running around the landscape to this day, in many a Prius. Thank you Stan - you were/are one of the great heroes to which we all owe a HUGE debt of gratitude ... proving not only are there better battery chemistries on the horizon, but that sometimes it's the great innovators like yourself that drag the rest of the industry begrudgingly forward.
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Patent encumbrance of large automotive NiMH batteries - Wikipedia

 

Can you imagine where EV technology would be today if GM would have kept up the research and technology evolution from the EV1!? It's still insane to me..

 

Yeah but that was old-GM. The pre-2009 company. If they had somehow survived the financial crisis, now-GM would be even further behind their competitors on the ev scoreboard.

 

Much of that technology did end up in later GM hybrids and the Volt. They had four door and PHEV concepts of the EV1 back then.

A problem with the Impact and other concept cars from PNGV was that the car companies didn't have to bring a car to market from it. Those hybrids had some amazing fuel efficiency, but they did it by being diesels with heavy use of materials like aluminum for reducing weight. As is, they would have been for more expensive than a comparable car for sale at the time.

The Volt started under old-GM, and it was one of the programs the government wanted to end as condition for the bail out. New-GM had to fight to keep it.

 

Besides the battery EV-1, they also made a CNG, a Series Hybrid, a Parallel Hybrid and a Fuel Cell EV-1.

 

There were a hand full of EV1's donated to universities - & (at least) 1 to a private collection, with much of their running guts pulled. The understanding (contractual agreement) between GM & the donee's was that they'd NEVER be rebuilt to street legal / licensed condition. A couple EV1's have been rebuilt .... & that begs the question - since the agreement was with the old GM which no longer exists due to its bankruptcy - one would think that the "DO NOT MAKE STREET LEGAL" agreement is no longer enforceable due to the death/non-existence of one of the parties.

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IIUC, there are similar questions being floated about why Russia's got the USSR's permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

 

I've long wondered if a 3d scanned EV1 and foam and fiber glass body, kit car could be made. Sold with an after market electric drivetrain, voila!

More expensive, CAD an impact structure with modern materials, perhaps even startup a small production line. Call it the "ELON-III".

Bob Wilson

 

It's body yielded a 0.19cd - which to this day has not been surpassed by any production car. Hats off to the aero engineers that pulled off such a feat - decades ago. Engineers comparable to what Kelly Johnson (SR71) pulled off so many decades ago ... drag cd ahead of its time - development beginning in the late 50's.
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they probably could if they wanted it to look something like this:

General_Motors_EV1

 

Kind of cool cool cool update - as the never sold to the public ev1 has been trounced, drag cd-wise by the Limited production, carbon fiber body over magnesium frame - 250 units or so actually sold to the public, & only one ever imported to the USA. The plug-in, 800cc, 2cyl common rail diesel XL1 Volkswagen.



drag cd of 0.188
(yea if you do a rounding error it would be the same as the Ev1. )

Volkswagen 1-litre car - Wikipedia

EV1 fuel efficiency equivalency estimated to be around 95 MPGE. XL1 Fuel efficiency estimated at 260 MPGe. But that's the more liberal European fuel standard so it's probably only getting 180-190 MPG on the US std.

 

What always stood out to me about the Prius story is how much of it wasn’t an overnight “big idea,” but more of a long internal push at Toyota to rethink efficiency when most of the industry was still focused purely on bigger engines and incremental gains. Once you dig into the early development work, it makes more sense why the first-gen car looked the way it did. It was clearly built around solving a very specific engineering problem rather than trying to follow market trends at the time.

One thing I’ve found helpful when reading up on its origin is paying attention to how Toyota treated the hybrid system as a long-term platform rather than a one-off experiment. That mindset shift is probably what allowed the later generations to improve so steadily without needing to reinvent everything from scratch each time.