The Wild True Story Behind The Only GM EV1 Ever Publicly Sold, And Where It’s Going Next

General Motors EV1 VIN #4G5PX2250V0200212 was never supposed to survive. Like most EV1s leased to drivers in the late 1990s, this adorably green electric icon was originally going to be crushed and turned to scrap metal, never to be seen again.

Except that’s not what happened. According to the original lessee from ’97, whom I spoke with on the phone, a series of legal twists and turns meant this EV1 was saved from the crusher by GM. Instead, the car ended up forgotten in a tow pound in Atlanta. Earlier this week, VIN #212 became the first EV1 to ever be legally sold to the public.

The new owner has big plans. He told me over the phone that he and a team of like-minded individuals have already begun the process to restore this EV1 to its former glory.

The EV1 Story In a Nutshell

Electric cars are a mainstay of today’s automotive landscape, but back in the 1990s, they were barely a blip on anyone’s radar. The EV1 was the first mass-produced electric car to be offered to the public, but it was only available in Southern states like California and Arizona, as cold weather would’ve zapped the lead-acid battery packs’ range, which was rated at around 90 miles.

With just 137 horsepower spinning the single front motor, the EV1 isn’t very impressive by modern standards. But it set the stage for future EVs to come, and brought with it a host of other innovations, like regenerative braking and low rolling-resistance tires. The two-door teardrop design was a huge factor in squeezing the most out of those batteries; the EV1 remains one of the slipperiest cars to ever hit the market, with a drag coefficient of just 0.19. That’s better than any of today’s Lucids or Teslas.

As I mentioned earlier, GM never actually sold any EV1s to the public. They were leased, with most of them taken back by the factory and crushed due to slowing demand and high costs, according to a former engineer. According to a nifty tracking page put together by Hemmings, GM saved around 40 examples and donated them to museums and universities. The subject in this story is not one of those cars, but a previously unknown, hidden example that the internet had never seen before.

“Is That My Car?”

Those were among the first words uttered to me over the phone by Jonathan Sawyer, a Boulder, Colorado-based electrical engineer who was the original lessee of VIN #212 back in 1997.

Sawyer is a lifelong electric car enthusiast, having owned several obscure and interesting EVs over the years.

“I’ve always had electric cars,” he told me over the phone. “I’ve got electric cars you wouldn’t believe. I’ve got the first [Tesla] Roadster here in Colorado, and Elon Musk personally gave me the key.
I have the electric RAV4, the original one. I convinced Toyota to lease them in Colorado, and I got a lease, and four years ago, they tried to take it away from me, and I sued them, and I won, and they gave me the car.”

Sawyer was understandably excited to get his hands on the world’s first mass-market, production EV. But living in Colorado, GM wouldn’t lease him a car. So he got clever.

“My sister lived in Tucson, so I got my sister to lease the car,” Sawyer said. “And then I smuggled the car up to Colorado, which pissed the shit out of them.”

GM allowed Sawyer to hold onto his lease, but he kept having to send the car back to Arizona for repairs. “Because the batteries were terrible, I would always ship the car back to Tempe, Arizona,” he told me.

According to Sawyer, GM issued a recall to fix a faulty charger that had the possibility of causing a fire. But instead of fixing the cars, they simply took them and never gave them back to the owners.

“They knew I was the one guy that wasn’t going to turn my car in, and they waited for me because every five months, I would have to send my car back to the dealership, because they always had to replace the battery,” Sawyer told me. “Those lead-acid batteries are terrible. So they waited for me to go into service, and when they had the service, the head of the program called me at home and said, ‘Jonathan, I’m really sorry, but we have to keep the car.’ And so I went there and I got my attorney, I said, ‘No, you can’t keep the car, 
I have a lease on the car.'”

Sawyer immediately filed a lawsuit against the company, but he didn’t want to sit around while his car was locked up at the dealer.

“I sat there and thought, well, shit, they stole my car,” he said. “So I called the Tempe Police Department, filed a stolen car report, and said, ‘It’s over at the dealer.’ And so a whole bunch of cops and the TV station showed up at the dealership, and they were going to arrest the guy because we had a stolen car.”

Except the car wasn’t there when the police arrived. “GM knew about this, and they smuggled the car separately from all the other cars out of the state,” Sawyer claims.

Because the car left the State, Sawyer had little recourse. “The cop says, ‘Well, the car’s out of State, contact the FBI.’ And I tried to contact the FBI, but they weren’t interested,” he tells me.

The car was stuck in legal limbo, which is why Sawyer theorizes it was saved from the crusher all those years ago.

“They realized that they’d better not cut that car up because there’s a judge who’s going through all this discovery in the lawsuit. We put them on notice: ‘Don’t cut up that car.'”

It’s equally possible that Sawyer’s car was simply one of the lucky ones that got spared and earmarked for donation. But his theory also makes sense. If that lawsuit, which ultimately fizzled out, had resulted in GM having to give back the car, it would have probably been better if there had been a car to give back.

“They were trying to hide it because I was trying to track it down,” Sawyer speculated. “But I did know this: They did not ever want to cut up that car.”

So How’d It End Up For Sale In a Tow Pound?

We’ll probably never know exactly how this particular EV1 avoided an untimely death, but I think I’ll stick with Sawyer’s story, because it’s so fascinating and filled with drama. How the car went from a dealership in Arizona to a tow pound in Atlanta is an entirely different tale.

As I reported on Tuesday, the tow pound—A-Tow Atlanta—told me over the phone the EV1 was marked as abandoned by the Clark Atlanta University Public Safety agency—the school’s on-site police force—and towed away. No one at the school seems to know exactly why the EV1 was marked as abandoned—the only person I got on the phone had an inkling of its existence, but knew next to nothing of the car, describing it as an “urban legend.”

The idea that VIN #212 ended up at a university makes sense. Like I mentioned earlier, the EV1s that were saved were shipped off to schools and museums, so it’s very likely Sawyer’s car, being a car that wasn’t crushed (or that couldn’t be crushed, if you believe his theory), was sent to Clark Atlanta and forgotten about – until this week, that is.

Meet The Man Who Dropped Six Figures On A Car That Was Never Supposed To Be Sold

The tow pound obtained a court order to sell the EV1 out of its lot, setting the internet ablaze on Monday night into Tuesday afternoon. The car was auctioned off through Peak Auto Auctions on Tuesday, with 134 bids placed and a sale price $104,000 before fees.

Billy, the car’s new owner, wasn’t going to let this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip past him. (Billy’s last name and other identifying characteristics are being withheld, as he’d like to keep his identity a secret.)

“I bid a lot more than what the final price ended up being,” he told me over the phone. “With two minutes left, I put in a huge bid of $156,000. And we just watched for three minutes as everyone else bid it up, and it stopped at 104. Someone bid 102, basically. And then the auto bid kicked in for us at 104. And we just watched the countdown go down, and then we couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.”

The total price, after all the tow pound charges, came out to over $118,000—either an insane price for a non-running, no-title car or the best deal in the world, depending on who you ask.

“None of them realized what it was,” Billy said, describing the situation at the tow pound. He had flown in the night before from the West Coast to extract the car from its outdoor parking spot. “We went to the yard, and the guy Beau, who was in charge of the yard, was like, ‘My man. You are a celebrity.’
I paid $118,040. All the other cars that day, the total sum was less than $10,000.”

Bill met up with Jared Pink of The Questionable Garage YouTube channel (above), and together with a flatbed truck and a driver, managed to extract the car from the pound and transport it to an “undisclosed location,” where it’s currently undergoing a comprehensive restoration.

Resurrecting VIN #212 From The Dead

If there’s anyone who should be taking ownership of a derelict EV1 in need of a restoration, it’s Billy—at least according to what he’s told me. He describes himself as a hardcore EV enthusiast, with a dream of one day opening an electric car museum on the West Coast.

“I love electric vehicles,” says Billy. “I’ve never owned a car that runs on gasoline. I was driving all these old EVs. And I just kept collecting them and fixing them.”

Among his collection is a Chevy S10 Electric, a funky, all-electric version of the company’s small pickup that used a front-wheel drive layout and borrowed much of the EV1’s underpinnings.

“I have a Chevy S10 Electric. I have a huge collection of EV1 memorabilia, clothing, everything. [I’ve] always been obsessed with it since I watched the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? when I was 12.”

Reviving a 28-year-old EV with lots of proprietary parts is a lot harder than bringing a normal, gas-powered car back to life. But it’s not like it’s totally hopeless.

“There’s a hole in the windshield, and the quarter panel is broken in. But every other piece of the car was there, besides what was removed for decommission, when they gave it to the university,” Billy says. “Every hubcap, every knob, every mirror, the original formats. It was unreal how complete the car was, minus the damage.”

The “decommission” Billy mentions refers to the parts GM removed or disabled before the cars were given away. I connected with three people who worked at the company on the EV1 program back in the ’90s through the lovely (and very informative) GM EV1 Facebook group. All three told me the batteries were removed before the cars were donated. And that was the case here.

“It looks like a pretty standard decommission,” Billy said. “No batteries in this one, no battery harness. We took out the skid plates, and we took [out the T-shaped battery pack holder]. And it was a raccoon nest, and there was shit all over it. Have you ever seen dog poop? It looked like that, but it was skinnier. And it smelled. That was the only part of the car that smelled, believe it or not.”

Other things aren’t quite right. “The charge cable was cut,” Billy says. “Inside the power inverter module, we’re missing the driveline control module. 
It’s a computer that’s on the inside of the [power integrated module] that a bunch of these ribbon cables plug into. And one of our ribbon cables is ripped.”

“Luckily, between me and [another EV collector friend], we have S10 EVs. We’ve been preparing for this for a long time.”

Some parts will be tougher to replicate or replace than others.

“The windshield and the driver quarter panel are definitely big ones that we would love to find original[s], if possible,” Billy said.
”Otherwise, it’s gonna be expensive to make those. We’re willing to do it, but we’re gonna want to connect with other owners before we do something that big, just to see if we could share the costs, or make it a little bit more realistic.”

Right now, the car is in pieces with most of the interior removed so it can be dried out after sitting exposed to the elements. Billy wasn’t exactly confident about whether he’d get the car to run, but he expressed hope thanks to the amazing EV1 community.

“We are not confident, but we are gonna try,” he said. “I’m connected to a lot of people in the EV1 world who have EV1s, illegally or legally. And they have been giving me a lot of advice as well.”

Billy’s even set up an email account—v212ev1@gmail.com—to encourage those with advice or parts to reach out. His goal is to have the car running by November 14, 2026, which would be exactly 30 years since the first drive of the EV1 back in 1996. I’ll be rooting for him.

Top photo: Vehicle Owner