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.
"The loyalists who are gathered in Burbank are very passionate about the vehicle, but there simply weren't enough of them at any given time to make the EV1 a viable business opportunity for GM to pursue long term," he said. "Eight hundred leases in a four-year time frame does not a business make."
He said GM did not plan to sell the remaining cars to the demonstrators. One reason is that the model has 2,000 unique parts, many no longer available, raising safety concerns.
Before Sexton became an automotive consultant, whose specialty is electric vehicles, she helped market the EV1 for GM. Best of all, she got to drive it.
The battery-powered coupe was easy to pitch, said Sexton, even after she told customers that it had to be plugged in and its batteries recharged every 140 miles. All she had to do was get the customer behind the wheel: "It's fast and fun, and it will beat a Viper," she said.
The car was governed so that it couldn't go faster than 80 mph, but one set a land-speed record for an electric car at 183 mph, she recalled.
