and they were capable of handling most peoples commutes.

No. The first run of EV1s had a literal maximum range of 50 miles so absolute best case your commute could be 25 miles each way and that's assuming a fully charged battery, no traffic congestion, no use of the heater, and no cold weather. That would also see you barely rolling your car into the driveway as you got home where it would then spend a full 8 hours charging up again.

...they would have sold in modest numbers as a commuter car...

Again no. People won't buy an EV that will go 200+ miles because of range anxiety. There's absolutely no way a car with only 50 would have been bought by anyone, ESPECIALLY when the damn things cost nearly $100,000. And that was in 1996/1999 money! Any discussion of the EV1 in a thread about "affordable EVs" is just silly.

...and GM could have evolved it.

GM never stopped working on EV, they just stopped selling it to the public while the technology evolved. If everyone would just stop shitting out about the EV1 and take five minutes to look into it's clear.

In 2002, one year after the EV1 went away, GM started working on the Hybrid Tahoe and it was eventually released in 2008. It was expensive as all hell, again pushing up against $100,000 but it was in fact a parallel drivetrain SUV with a pile of Lithium Ion batteries under the passenger bench. It could only go a few miles on pure Electric Power but it's existence showed that GM was continuing to evolve the tech. They were also a great full sized SUV and I loved the one we had.

In 2010 came the Chevy Volt, a hybrid sedan. The first generation of the Volt used the same parallel EV drive that the Tahoe had. It would go about 35ish miles on electric. The 2nd Generation of it was a serial drive EV where the gas engine did nothing but provide electricity. It was made up until 2016.

Then in 2017, literally right as the Volt was discontinued, came the Chevy Bolt which is an actual pure EV with 220ish miles of range.

The Bolt is out of production for 2024 while GM swaps its drivetrain for the new Ultium stuff with a better battery, management system, and more range. It will be back, in upgraded form, in 2025.

So where in that timeline did GM abandon EV tech? They've literally been working on it non-stop since they started designing the EV1 around 1992!

Look at the history of Prius: the originals were horrible, expensive and lost tons of money, but Toyota stuck with them and evolved them into a huge, reliable, affordable moneymaker.

The Volt was a direct competitor to the 3rd Gen Prius and they were released within a year of each other. The Toyota got popular while the Chevy didn't, but that doesn't mean Chevy didn't have a car that competed with it.

BTW, where's Toyota's affordable EV? You know, the one to compete with the Bolt? Oh...right...

Basically everyone pretends that GM crushed all those EV1s back in '01 and then stuck it's head in the sand for the next twenty years but it's just not true at all and in fact GM is the only Domestic US Auto Manufacturer that sells an inexpensive EV.

Go pick on Ford or Dodge, your criticisms might be valid for them but not GM.