But MacKenzie quotes Howard Wilson, a man deeply involved in the EV1 program, as suggesting that the engineering team wanted to make the electric car a hybrid using a small gas turbine engine which could make enough electricity for the electric motors without a large battery. This could have reduced the weight of the vehicle and increased its range exponentially. Why didn't they do it? CARB had mandated that the automakers needed to offer at least two percent of their fleets as zero emission vehicles, which effectively sealed the fate of the hybrid EV1. These happenings left the door wide open for other companies, Toyota in particular, to carve out the hybrid niche for themselves. The rest, as they say, is history.
I don't know why anyone else in the Western developed world should be interested. This problem and conclusion was entirely in the domain of California.
Did CARB kill the electric car?
