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The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

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Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#51

Post by maxerickson »

api wrote: post #29

The EV1 was way, way ahead of its time, and was more or less outright killed for various reasons including car makers having deep sunk cost in ICE engine tech. The battery tech back then was vastly inferior to today but it was still good enough for a shorter-range economy EV that could have replaced a gas for a lot of daily commuter drives, especially for two-car families. For reference: the first generation Nissan L…

How much do you think the EV1 cost just to build?

I don't know, but I'd bet it wasn't "cheap second car" low.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#52

Post by joecool1029 »

bluGill wrote: post #38
trollbridge wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My state lets you register hand built and other oddball vehicles - basically, if you can get it past customs, you can register it. The out of state inspection for a title transfer is to check the VIN. Insurance would need to be from a specialty provider who do insure oddball vehicles. Someone I know (in CA no less) insured his homemade electric motorcycle this way. (It’s titled as the chassis of the BMW regular motor…

You have to show you built it though. A stock BYD would probably not count, I'm not sure how much change you would need though to get it to count as homemade.

I think a chassis is the deciding factor, since you can shove modern components in 50+ year old chassis and build street legal hotrods. You register it as that old chassis model from whatever manufacturer built it.

As I understand BYD use less components than the other traditional car manufacturers (more brains/integration in axle vs having lots of CAN connected shit around the car) so in theory I could see builders installing a BYD drivetrain into an old chassis the same way people can do LS swaps into Miatas.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#53

Post by pixl97 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #16
adenta wrote: post #4

Do we all have that one friend who also secretly has an EV1, or is that just me?

I bet for every example there's a hundred more that are just not registered and or are registered as something else. It's like machine guns, you're not paying for the hardware. You're paying to not have the state send a squad of thugs to shoot you for not getting permission. People don't want the permission. They want the hardware. So they just get the hardware and keep it on the down low. Also, everyone in automotiv…

>You're paying to not have the state send a squad of thugs to shoot you for not getting permission

Hmm, you could get a swatting 2.0 by taking real video and shoving in some LLm generated scenes of people showing off their machine gun (parts) pretty easy.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#54

Post by rvba »

> Except the car wasn’t there when the police arrived. “GM knew about this, and they smuggled the car separately from all the other cars out of the state,” Sawyer claims.

> Because the car left the State, Sawyer had little recourse. “The cop says, ‘Well, the car’s out of State, contact the FBI.’ And I tried to contact the FBI, but they weren’t interested,” he tells me.

I dont understand this part of the story. So if somene steals a car and drives it out of state only FBI can search for it and they dont???

Doesnt this mean legalization of crime?

If it works on the car, will it work on other things too, that they just look the other way?

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#55

Post by joecool1029 »

fragmede wrote: post #6
potato3732842 wrote: post #3

Impound/tow/lien -> title has always been the easy button for getting legit title to a vehicle that was never supposed to be sold (UPS vans, Uhaul trailers, etc), so long as it was never reported stolen. Absolutely hilarious that he managed to work the "doesn't work it if pops up as stolen" angle in the opposite direction to make the car impossible to really do anything with (i.e. no junkyard can take it whole, no su…

Could you do anything like that to trick the DMV into letting you register a BYD vehicle in California?

Yes, and it's been done in the past. Will likely still get caught at some point. I had a friend that owned a Motorex skyline where the importer did the testing but then fudged the papers to say it was something else and federal gov revoked its status but people that had cars imported before that got to keep them.

This article has some info about it and other things: https://www.jalopnik.com/here-s-how-people-illegally-import-...

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#56

Post by dboreham »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #30
nocoiner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t the Model T the first mass-produced automobile? Wouldn’t surprise me if the early 20th century electric cars were basically handbuilt by dozens or even hundreds of different manufacturers.

The Model T is the first assembly line produced automobile. Mass production significantly predates the Model T. Generally, the production of guns in France in 1765 using standardized parts is generally considered the first mass produced item.

Dang. I thought it was the British Navy pulley blocks.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#57

Post by dboreham »

api wrote: post #41
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you name check Musk and not the actual founders of Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning, that took advantage of their experience with lithium batteries and the forward-thinking Californian regulatory regime to found their company there to build an electric sports car?

Good point, and they're worth name checking too, but the company didn't go anywhere big until Musk took over. Musk clearly has (or at least had) a great skill when it comes to scaling companies doing hard things. If he had one under his belt, like Tesla, I'd be willing to chalk it up to luck, but he has two: Tesla and SpaceX. Both have been spectacular successes doing things most people run away from screaming with t…

> A person can be good at something and still be a lunatic or an asshole.

There's a correlation. He's "successful" precisely because he's a lunatic/asshole.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#58

Post by fragmede »

joecool1029 wrote: post #55
fragmede wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you do anything like that to trick the DMV into letting you register a BYD vehicle in California?

Yes, and it's been done in the past. Will likely still get caught at some point. I had a friend that owned a Motorex skyline where the importer did the testing but then fudged the papers to say it was something else and federal gov revoked its status but people that had cars imported before that got to keep them. This article has some info about it and other things: https://www.jalopnik.com/here-s-how-people-illegall…

Thanks for sharing, that's a wild ride!

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#59

Post by potato3732842 »

joecool1029 wrote: post #55
fragmede wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you do anything like that to trick the DMV into letting you register a BYD vehicle in California?

Yes, and it's been done in the past. Will likely still get caught at some point. I had a friend that owned a Motorex skyline where the importer did the testing but then fudged the papers to say it was something else and federal gov revoked its status but people that had cars imported before that got to keep them. This article has some info about it and other things: https://www.jalopnik.com/here-s-how-people-illegall…

>This article has some info about it and other things:

Even by sketchers and jorts standards that's still, wow. The way that article is just dripping with post-boot saliva is a great illustration of the gulf between high class "porche or miata + Land" type car enthusiasts and "buys whole cars for parts" type enthusiasts. Hopefully Doug's opinions have, uh, refined, over the last decade. Can't see how they wouldn't have.

Re: The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold

#60

Post by toast0 »

rvba wrote: post #54

> Except the car wasn’t there when the police arrived. “GM knew about this, and they smuggled the car separately from all the other cars out of the state,” Sawyer claims. > Because the car left the State, Sawyer had little recourse. “The cop says, ‘Well, the car’s out of State, contact the FBI.’ And I tried to contact the FBI, but they weren’t interested,” he tells me. I dont understand this part of the story. So if…

If you know where it ended up, you can probably get State resources activated over there too. But if you need law enforcement to investigate an interstate case, you pretty much need the FBI.

The FBI does not investigate all reported crimes, and neither do state and local law enforcement, so yeah... if you do crime that nobody wants to investigate, you can get away with it; at least until those meddling kids show up.

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