GM’s Electric Cars Relegated to a Back Seat : Autos: Ambitious manufacturing plans are scaled back. And the company seeks to spread development costs among the Big Three.
General Motors said Friday that it will severely cut back its electric-vehicle manufacturing plans and hopes to share development costs with the other two big U.S. auto makers.
GM had long said it would have an assembly line in place by the mid-1990s, producing thousands of electric cars for ordinary consumers.
On Friday, the company said instead that it would build, by hand, 50 versions of its prototype Impact vehicle in 1993. But GM will likely retain ownership, using them across the country to help develop a market for the alternative vehicles.
“We’ve got the technology nailed, but we may have gotten ahead of the market,” GM spokeswoman Jean Crocker said.
The U.S. Council for Automotive Research on Friday said that its members--Chrysler, Ford and GM--have agreed to “investigate cooperation” in the design and possible manufacture of electric-vehicle parts, a move to share the high development costs of commercializing the electric car.
GM’s retrenchment is “a severe disappointment,” said Michael R. Peevey, president of Southern California Edison Co. and chairman of Calstart, a consortium attempting to spark an advanced transportation industry in Southern California.
Besides the environmental effects of slowing the introduction of electric cars to smoggy Southern California, Peevey sees the move as a setback to the U.S. auto industry.
“I’m afraid this gives away the U.S. lead in electric-car technology,” Peevey said. Calstart’s intent, he said, is to sell California-built components to the 17 manufacturers around the world that are developing electric cars.
“Obviously, the hope was that GM coming to commercialization of a vehicle in approximately two years would spur much faster an electric vehicle for personal use,” Peevey said.
Money-losing GM has been under intense pressure to cut back unprofitable development lines, and the company has been concerned over the unknowns of the electric-car marketplace.
“This uncertainty and rapidly changing technology makes major capital investment at this time high risk,” said Kenneth R. Baker, GM’s manager of electric vehicles.
Zero-emissions cars--which are most likely to be electric-powered--are required in California beginning in 1998 under rules set by the California Air Resources Board. GM said the delay will not prevent the company from meeting the 1998 deadline, which requires that 2% of each big auto makers’ California models for that year emit no pollutants into the atmosphere.
“The only thing they’ve scaled back are their own internal deadlines,” ARB spokesman Bill Sessa said. “But it doesn’t affect our standards, or when those standards are due.
