I'm sure you guys understand that hundreds of people wanting and EV1 would mean nothing to GM, right? Like was said above it'd have to have been hundreds of thousands in order to garner a profit not to mention having keep up with maintance of batteries which even now we can see can be quite costly (one of the complaints of the Prius).
It's true that I've made a battery controller in my basement too and I can't believe such a defect got through to production, but I really don't know what it was like in 1996. Reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGBT#History You can see that IGBTs didn't really get up to speed until the early 1980s. 20 years later they're still quite pricey and I imagine even more expensive 10 years ago. Deep cycle batteries are really expensive now too and I bet cost more back then.
I'm just saying I can see the reasoning behind them wanting to end it and wanting to get everyone off the road for liability reasons. I mean you think it's great because it's an electric car but it was VERY tiny and had many issues and a super short range in winter. Could you really deal with driving a quirky car like that for the fuel savings? I look at them more as the predecessor to the neighborhood EVs.
goofy1 
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