As the General Motors Corporation shuts assembly plants and veers toward bankruptcy, the lonely remnants of one of its top technological achievements--the first modern mass-produced electric car--lie scattered across a few dozen American college campuses. GM produced and leased to customers more than 1,000 "EV1" automobiles beginning in 1996. In an act still decried by environmentalists, the company took them off the road in 2003 and crushed them into scrap metal. Only about 40 were spared and given to universities and museums. Looking at an EV1 collecting dust in the corner of a Howard University campus garage in Washington, Jason C. Ganley, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, says that "if General Motors would have continued this kind of work on their own, they would have made a lot of the progress that they're trying to make now, a long time ago." Students and professors are now experimenting with these and other vehicles. Electric cars, which run on less-polluting and even nonpolluting sources of energy, could be a huge part of the nation's energy puzzle.