http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-electric12mar12.storyVigil an Outlet for EV1 Fans
Enthusiasts hope their 24-hour presence at a GM facility in Burbank will change the firm's decision to scrap the last of its electric cars.
By Patricia Ward Biederman
Times Staff Writer
March 12, 2005
The vigil in Burbank is now in its fourth week, a period made miserable at times by torrential rains. Twenty-four hours a day, day in and day out, a dedicated group of enthusiasts has been camped out in front of the General Motors' facility here.
The group includes actors, engineers, automotive consultants and just plain car nuts. To a person, they fret about what fossil fuels do to the environment. Now sleep deprived from pulling night shifts on the curb, the protesters are here to save not whales or some other endangered species but 71 of the last of GM's legendary electric car, the EV1.
The threatened vehicles sit in a parking lot behind the building, where a GM employee plugs them in from time to time to keep them road-ready.
General Motors made 1,000 of the revolutionary clean cars in the 1990s, leasing most of them. In August, the last lease was up, and GM took back the vehicles. Since then, the Burbank protesters say, the company has been crushing the cars in Mesa, Ariz.
"We estimate they've already destroyed 800 of them," said Chelsea Sexton, one of the organizers of the protest that began Feb. 16. Dozens of EV1 enthusiasts have offered to buy the remaining vehicles for about $25,000 each.
Dave Barthmuss, a spokesman for GM in Thousand Oaks, said he understood the affection the protesters have for the EV1 but that there wasn't a big enough market to support the car.<snip>
All six of the major auto companies that developed electric cars have abandoned the technology, he said.
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