- A green 1997 EV1 fetched $104,000 at auction last year, and it's being fully restored.
- The private effort attracted GM's attention, and the automaker opened up its archives.
- GM has also provided support by supplying impossible-to-find spare parts, including a replacement windshield.
GM's EV1 was a forward-looking and optimistic effort by the automaker, the first mass-market EV built by a U.S. automaker. Unfortunately, the company pulled the plug on it, literally and figuratively. Very few were made, and most of them were crushed when they were returned off lease, making survivors very rare, but not unheard of.
Found in a junkyard late last year and put up for auction, a green 1997 EV1 had been sitting for so long unclaimed that it fell under abandoned vehicle status. Legally, that meant it could be purchased at auction and registered.
The winning bid was eventually a staggering $104,000. That's Corvette Grand Sport money for a car that doesn't run and has had a brick thrown through its windshield. You'd need to be just as optimistic as GM's engineers were in the mid-1990s.
Enter Billy Caruso, Apple employee and owner of a small fleet of reborn early EVs. Caruso has nearly a dozen EV oddballs from the 1990s, and fittingly, he daily drives a Bolt. Adding an EV1 to his collection is basically like finding the Holy Grail. But the car will need more than elbow grease to set right again.
Which is where mechanic and YouTuber Jared Pink comes in. The creator of The Questionable Garage channel, Pink knew Caruso already from a previous battery-electric S10 project, and the pair soon teamed up and began tearing the EV1 down. In a happy surprise, General Motors then came calling too.
As the only privately titled EV1 known to exist, Caruso's chassis No. 212 had attracted the attention of GM right to the top. The company hosted Caruso and Pink and their team in Detroit, opened up their archives, and even supplied some hard-to-find OEM parts. This included a replacement windshield for the one that had a brick tossed through it.
It's a remarkable amount of support from an OEM manufacturer, and it makes the restoration effort much easier to complete. Having suffered water damage from sitting outside, No. 212 will require a significant level of effort to see the road again. Replacement parts, original schematics, and even know-how from GM's engineers will all help the effort.
It's a bit of an about-turn for GM, which originally cancelled the EV1 program in 2003. In the intervening decades, as EVs became mainstream offerings, cars like Caruso's have grown a legacy worth preserving. A big-battery behemoth like the current Hummer took its first steps with this little oddball EV.
The Questionable Garage crew posted a video about receiving a crate of parts from GM just a couple of weeks ago, so the restoration is still very much in progress. But sometime in the not-too-distant future, a green EV1 will again be driving around California's roads, a symbol of 1990s battery-electric hope for the future.
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Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.