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By Root 931 0

any terrain, it also used a lot of fuel. And so, with a well-dressed, blonde, suburban housewife at the wheel, gliding up to a parking space at Neiman Marcus, the Hummer H2 became the detested symbol of a “let them eat cake” insouciance displayed by a moneyed upper middle class. What a fat, irresistible target for the left-leaning media: class warfare and defense of our beleaguered planet, all enabled by vitriolic attacks on the Hummer H2. It was a perfectly good vehicle that consumed no more fuel than a large Mercedes sedan, a Lamborghini Murciélago two-seater, or the much smaller Porsche Cayenne twin turbo sport-utility (and not much more than the virtuous Toyota’s own Land Cruiser, Sequoia, or Lexus 470). And so, we were daily bombarded by salvo after salvo of “GM bad,Toyota good” or “GM dumb,Toyota brilliant.”

Easily forgotten in the mad virtue versus evil media feeding frenzy was the fact that the real pioneer in fuel-free automobiles was none other than diabolical old GM itself.

At huge investment, and at a time when “advanced batteries” really were at the limits of known chemistry, GM, in 1996, launched the revolutionary EV1, a composite-bodied, suppositoryshaped two-seater, crammed with lead-acid (later nickel-metal-hydride) batteries and capable of a range of up to 50-60 miles between charges. Expensive to produce and impossible to sell, the 1,200 or so built had to be leased at derisory rates to get them into the hands of customers. Many of the latter were Hollywood personalities who deeply believed that their use of EV1 (in addition to three Ferraris and S-Class Mercedes V12s) would help atone for America’s social and environmental sins: it felt so good to drive one.

But it was costing GM a fortune to keep the EV1s on the road, and so we advised the lessees (all the cars remained the property of GM) that we would not be renewing the leases. Against massive protests from the small but vocal lessee base, we pulled the EV1s from the roads.

And then, in a PR blunder of truly gargantuan proportions, based on legal opinion designed to eliminate product liability risk from any EV1s getting back on the road, we crushed them. If GM had bombed churches and hospitals, the outcry could not have been more negative.And, of course, conspiracy theories abounded, giving rise to Chris Paine’s cult classic documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, in which it is broadly hinted that GM somehow received massive financial inducement from Big Oil to eliminate this menace to the petroleum companies’ future profitability. Yet another reason to praise the benevolent Toyota Motor Company while vilifying the greedy, Hummer-producing, EV1-killing, planet-destroying GM.

The fact that GM was the absolute world leader in the development of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle—basically an electric vehicle that creates its own electricity from compressed stored hydrogen—was undeniably true, but failed to resonate with the media or public.We had exciting prototypes, one after another. We had press conferences and press drives, with a focus on Southern California, the hotbed of environmental consciousness. We poured countless billions into fuel cell research. We built a fleet of production-like Chevrolet Equinoxes with fuel cells as their power source. We lent them to influential personalities (no more leases that would give the user a sense of entitlement to permanent ownership).

None of it really worked, because the timetable we (and everyone else working on hydrogen fuel cells) stated for the beginning of full-scale commercial production was a rolling ten years. That time frame is clearly too long for the instant gratification mind-set of the media and environmentally conscious portion of the public. Besides (and this is a legitimate concern), where does the hydrogen come from? How is it produced, distributed, compressed, and filled into the hugely expensive tanks at ten thousand PSI?

Gas stations, on the other hand, were at virtually every corner, and electrical outlets were abundantly available in every house, condo, garage, or place of business.