Imagine this idyllic scenario: you’re driving your 20-mile commute to work—a little above the current national average—in a smallish, slightly expensive, American-made car. Since you’re chronically late, you’re pushing the speed limit a bit, doing 80 miles-an-hour.  

But instead of the rumble of the engine and the rush of the highway air, there’s hardly a sound, just the occasional quiet whine from behind your seat.  Yes, not only is your car one of the lightest and most aerodynamically efficient vehicles ever produced—it’s also fully electric.  

There are no noxious, planet-warming, smog-forming emissions streaming from your tailpipe. Even if your car did produce such things, there’d be no pipe for them to emanate from. That means no muffler to fall off and litter the roadway, and no catalytic converter to leech heavy metals in waterways and landfills.  

The engine requires no gas and no oil, meaning no new oil filters, and no gallon of toxic petrochemical waste produced for every 3000 miles of driving. In fact, most of the car’s components are fully electronic, meaning they rarely wear out.  Other than requiring new tires and a battery replacement every 150,000 miles or so, your ride needs essentially no maintenance. 

After a hard day’s work, you pop back into the car, drive back to your garage and simply plug it into the wall. A few hours of charging and a few cents’ worth of electricity later, your machine is fully charged, ready for 160 more miles of continuous driving before it needs a recharge. 

Such is the utopia plug-in electric cars could provide.  And by what year should you expect such a wonder-vehicle? 2010? 2020? 2050?

Try 1996. 

In what might be viewed a simultaneous high point and nadir for the American automobile industry, GM produced and leased the groundbreaking EV1 in the late '90s, more than a decade before Honda’s just-released fuel cell car, and even ahead of that company's now-discontinued Insight. But no sooner had GM created this masterpiece,  they killed it off.

Only a few living EV1 fossils remain, kept alive by rouge engineers. There’s no need tfor speculation on the energy savings, consumer benefit, and reduced environmental impact of the battery electric vehicle (BEV), because on a limited scale (1,200 vehicles), we’ve already seen what they are. 

GM argued that no one wanted the EV1. Too small. Limited range. In response to consumer demands they pushed SUVs, relegating BEVs  to curiosities. But with independent manufacturers releasing powerful new models, it will only be a matter of time before gas prices and public demand bring BEVs back onto the streets,.