A rare GM EV1 saved from the crusher is going to be driveable again

The General Motors EV1 has a vital place in electric vehicle history. It mainly served to show two things:

1. Show a viable path for battery-electric vehicles back in the 1990s.
2. Some forces are clearly at play to suppress electric cars.

GM only leased the EV1, never sold any, and prevented almost anyone from keeping them when it killed the vehicle program.

The automaker ended up crushing the vast majority of them. While a few empty shells exist in museums, they are strictly prohibited from ever driving again. But a new project has surfaced involving what appears to be the only legally owned EV1 in private hands, and the new owner plans to put it back on the road with a modern battery pack.

A YouTube channel called Electrek Garage (no relation to us, though we like the name) posted a fascinating video detailing the acquisition and restoration plan for this unicorn of an EV.

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For those who don’t know the history, GM built the EV1 in the late 90s to comply with California’s ZEV mandate. When the mandate was softened, after much lobbying from GM and others, GM controversially cancelled the program.

Because the cars were only leased, GM took them back and sent almost all of them to the crusher. Many EV1 drivers campaigned for GM to let them buy the cars, a campaign that was documented in Chris Paine’s popular ‘Who killed the electric car?’ movie.

A handful were deactivated by removing critical parts and donated to universities and museums, but GM required the institutions to sign contracts ensuring the cars would never be reactivated.

Now, a couple of engineers and tinkerers on YouTube managed to get their hands on what could be a very unique EV1.

This specific EV1 (VIN #278) was donated to a university that eventually forgot about it. It was towed as an abandoned vehicle, impounded, and eventually sold at auction under a court order. That legal chain of events reportedly broke GM’s restrictive ownership contract, making this possibly the only “unrestricted” EV1 in the wild, though I am hearing that there might be a handful of other, lower-profile ones out there.

It recently sold at auction for roughly $104,000.

Restoring the GM EV1

The car is currently a brick. As part of the decommissioning process, GM removed the inverter, the battery, and critical control modules. The host of the video, Declan Kavanaugh, explains that the car also has a smashed windshield—a part that is effectively impossible to replace.

However, the team has a solid plan. They found that the Chevy S10 Electric, a short-lived EV from the same era, shares many components with the EV1, and they have already sourced a replacement inverter.

The most exciting part is the battery. The original Gen 1 EV1 used a heavy, low-density lead-acid pack. The restoration team plans to engineer a custom Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery pack. This won’t just make the car run; it should give it a range of over 200 miles, significantly better than the original spec.

The goal is to have the vehicle driving by November 14, 2026, to mark the 30th anniversary of the EV1 launch.

You can watch the full video here:

Electrek’s Take

I want to start with a quick note about the ‘Electrek Garage’ name, just to make sure there’s no confusion and no one is stealing the name from anyone.

This site was named Electrek by its founder and publisher, Seth Weintraub, who literally thought he was making up a word at the time. Coincidentally, and something we learned a few years after we started running the site, an obscure (and possibly ugliest ever) electric car built in Colorado in the late 1970s was also named ‘Electrek’.

It looks like the ‘Electrek Garage’ YouTube channel started by restoring an old Electrek car – hence the name of the channel and why there’s technically no connection with us whatsoever. Looks like a cool channel though, we don’t mind sharing a name.

Now to the matter at hand, it is always incredible to see an EV1 that escaped GM’s crusher, but to see one that might actually drive again is something else entirely.

We will be watching this project closely and can’t wait for the next update to see if they were able to make this thing drivable.