If recent jaw-dropping documentaries such as “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “An Inconvenient Truth” have you slapping your palm to your forehead, check out “Who Killed the Electric Car?” It’s a stupefying account of a good idea that was strangled in its cradle.
In the 1990s, General Motors developed an electric car, partly in response to a California law that required a small percentage of cars sold in that smog-choked state to be non-polluting. The EV-1 (leased, not sold) came before the public in 1996 and other auto companies followed suit.
In the film, we hear a lot of testimonials from ecstatic EV drivers. Because this is Southern California, some of them are famous people – including Mel Gibson and “Baywatch” babe Alexandra Paul. Tom Hanks is seen extolling the virtues of the EV on a vintage clip from the David Letterman show.
None of which mattered in the slightest, because at a certain point GM decided to deep-six the electric car. Filmmaker Chris Paine, an electric car buff, has tried to track down the reasons, and he lists the possible culprits: Automakers? Oil companies? The government? Consumers?
The suspects look pretty usual, especially when “consumer groups” lobbying against the electric car are revealed to be funded by oil companies.
And check out GM’s television spots for the electric car, which make a marked contrast from the sex-and-youth ads for most cars. They resemble advertisements for nuclear apocalypse.
The company didn’t help anything by stating that when it started retrieving cars from drivers, it would hold them benignly. In fact, a huge number of like-new cars were demolished.
Paine (no relation to Thomas, I assume, although he’s in the same spirit) doesn’t try to be even-handed here, and there’s very little in the film that suggests he should be. Some commentators have suggested the EV was more problem-prone than Paine lets on, but even if it were, the car was clearly a promising alternative. The movie does acknowledge the limitations on how much driving could be done without re-charging, although this was well within an average person’s daily driving.
Of course the timing for this movie couldn’t be better. When one talking head comes on and bemoans gas prices at $2.20 a gallon, you will probably feel your fingernails going through the armrests of your chair. Ah yes, those innocent days of $2.20-a-gallon gasoline. Er, why was the electric car such a bad idea?
A “funeral procession” for the electric car from “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
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