General Motors Electovair II
“The best time to start was yesterday, the next best time is now.”
Well, what if you’re General Motors, and you had started working on electric cars in the 1960s, but decided along the way to abandon the 60 year head start?
Correction: The best time to start was yesterday, the next best time is for someone else to figure out, at some point, in the future.
Even back then, if you knew what electricity was capable of, betting against electric cars must have seemed shortsighted. The status quo relied on a volatile, energy-dense, highly refined consumable byproduct of the earth’s geological processes that creates toxic fumes when burned — with its own existing, embedded network and culture of service stations, diners, drive-ins, and dives.
Stick with what you know, perhaps because North America’s gasoline-fuelled lifestyle also wasn’t that established, and had really only been expanded post-Second World War.
Enthusiasts of Mid-Century EVs often forget: gasoline culture was still fresh.
GM Electrovair II’s front and rear trunks were LOADED with batteries. Electric controls were behind the rear seats. • GM
In comparison, think of the room-sized computers and counting machines many large businesses relied upon before everything in those computers was miniaturized, over a few decades of development, down to a form we carry in our pockets.
Similarly, early electric cars of that era were both functionally useless despite being based on fundamentally better, superior technologies where, when the job is harnessing a force of nature, all engineers really needed was a long-term investment in resources and in time.
Want American electric cars, built in America?
The opportunity passed by in the 1960s, again in the 1990s, and despite commentators believing in local manufacturing miracles, there is no going back.
It could have been years of exposure to leaded fuels, testosterone-led product planning, or a genuine need to “count beans”, but shortsightedness was in huge supply within the Detroit area and among domestic automakers toward the latter half of the 1960s and into the 1970s.
Here in North America, it’s my opinion that this success made decision-makers at these companies vulnerable to roads not taken.
To say EV development was in its infancy in the 1960s would be both true and false.
Electric cars were in fact more numerous than gasoline vehicles at the turn of the 20th Century — so it’s not like electric cars were a new thing in 1966. New developments from that time included better batteries, control units, and electric motors, components that were very much in their infancy.
GM Electrovair II in the studio, and again outdoors at GM Design • GM
For example, the Electovair II didn’t have regenerative brakes, a now-standard feature for EVs.
The first Electrovair, built in 1964, was an interesting vehicle but not as impressive performance-wise as the second, made just two years after. If you’re on the fence about Chevrolet’s Volt or Bolt names, knowing it passed up “Electrovair” as a potential name should make you furious.
In a modern sense, the car gave good performance, with its top speed and all-electric performance matching up pretty well with a surprising number of EV startups and failed models from the last few decades as I write this. Yes, the Electrovair II lacks Bluetooth, iPod jack, and the luggage space was filled with batteries, but the numbers it put up in testing were pretty good.
From a 115 horsepower AC electric motor and 532 volts of silver-zinc batteries, the car could reach a speed of 130 km/h (80 mph), and its range was between 65-130 km (40-80 miles) on a six hour charge.
At a chonky 453 kg (1,000 lbs) heavier than the gasoline Corvair, acceleration was about as brisk as a modern smart fortwo, at 16 seconds from zero-to-100 km/h (62 mph).
In the company’s excellent promotional footage on the car (below), the announcer candidly states that what the Electrovair II really needs is a better battery.
After just 100 recharges, the batteries needed to be replaced. I agree this would have been a non-starter for any production car, however, we’re talking about an electric car with a powertrain roughly 60 years more primitive than the latest models being shown in China.
