Tom Hanks Tells All About His Toyota RAV4 Electric Vehicle

Though he's best known for his screen exploits , Tom Hanks also counts himself as a green car guy.

He still owns a Toyota RAV4 electric vehicle (like the one shown here) that has crossed 50,000 miles on the odometer. We know this courtesy of a letter that Hanks recently wrote to The New Yorker.

Hanks explains that he still has the car, which is driven daily (albeit by one of his employees) and that the vehicle still has its original battery.

Hanks wrote the letter to the editor to clear up a mistake made when Peter J. Boyer recently wrote about the country's financially troubled automobile industry. In his The New Yorker article (registration required), Boyer incorrectly stated that Hanks once owned a General Motors Corp. EV1.

Hanks said that there were no EV1s to be had in 2003 when he started looking for an electric car.

"Instead, I found what was purported to be the very last electric car available for sale in the state of California -- a Toyota EV," Hanks wrote. "It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine."
 
Toyota stopped manufacturing the RAV4 EV in 2003.

Here's a bit of what Toyota had to say upon pulling the RAV4 EV plug:

"Although a significant marketing effort was undertaken for the RAV4-EV, we only sold about 300 vehicles a year. 

In addition to overall customer acceptance, technical issues tied to electric vehicles remain a major hurdle. Industry practice regards batteries to be at the end of their useful life when capacity decreases to 80% of original capacity.

A battery's capacity is the amount of charge that it holds, and is commonly measured by the range of the vehicle. It is cost-prohibitive to replace an EV battery. The cost to replace the battery is more than the value of the vehicle."

Posted by

Greg Johnson May 12, 2009, 1:18 PM

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Batteries, General Motors, Plug-ins and Electric, Toyota

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Electric Car Batteries, EV Manufacturing, General Motors Corp. General Motors EV1, Toyota EV, Toyota RAV4 EV