WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?
Directed and written by Chris Payne
The first big surprise in Chris Paine's new documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? is that the General Motors EV1 - a two-seater powered solely by electric batteries - was a sexy car, not a nerdmobile. Designed to satisfy a zero-emissions mandate passed by the California Air Resources Board in 1990, it could accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than eight seconds and travel up to 120 miles on a single charge. The EV1 was never for sale; General Motors built some 1,000-plus units at its Craft Center in Lansing, Michigan, and leased them to carefully vetted customers in California and Arizona between 1996 and 2000.
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On its own terms the car was a success, proving that an electric automobile could satisfy at least some American consumers - even though, as this film alleges, GM had intended all along for it to fail. After intimidating the California board into backing off its mandate, the automaker canceled the EV1 program, confiscated the cars from their happy drivers, and trucked them out to the Nevada desert to be crushed and shredded - all while simultaneously throwing its corporate muscle behind another new product: the Hummer.
Paine's film tells the sad and rather infuriating story of how a once-great American automaker, briefly arm-twisted by government into showing what it could really do, then insisted on abandoning a technology that could have addressed the problems of smog, climate change, and peak oil in a substantive way. Paine employs a mix of talking heads, industrial promotion films, and miscellaneous cinema-verite footage to weave a complex narrative that offers much information in a short time while neither losing its clarity nor shoving its conclusions down the viewer's throat. Auto-industry spokespersons elaborate, with odd diffidence, on the EV1's limitations, taking care to explain what the car could not do. Meanwhile, the drivers who leased it - including showbiz celebs Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks - wax eloquent on what it could do, how much they loved driving it, and how they hated to part with it.
Paine hangs much of his narrative on the personal story of Chelsea Sexton, a young marketing professional who threw herself into the promotion of the EV1. We see her nostalgically recalling the relationships she developed with her customers, lamenting the ineffectiveness of GM's geeky, off-putting ad campaign for the car, and leading protests at lots where the cars are stored pending their destruction. Other EV1 drivers chime in with their own stories about the car's performance and coolness - and about the convenience of charging it up in your garage overnight like a cellphone, instead of having to buy gas. Ralph Nader puts in his two cents about the automakers' disregard for the consumer, and even comedienne Phyllis Diller shows up to reminisce about being six years old, riding in her family's "darling electric car" in the days before Henry Ford and his gasoline automobiles had established industry dominance over their electric and steam-powered competitors. Paine also includes some bittersweet sequences of EV1 drivers bidding fond goodbyes to their cars as GM tows them away after refusing all offers to sell them outright.
Unfortunately, we get only a few tantalizing glimpses of the EV1 in action: peeling out, accelerating, changing lanes, all while emitting its distinctive electric whine. Even so, Paine does manage to convey that this was a car made to satisfy people who enjoy driving. We meet engineer Alan Cocconi, who explains how his design of the EV1's power system was analogous to that of a very powerful three-channel stereo amplifier, enabling the car to respond to a wide range of road conditions. Battery designer Stanford Ovshinsky talks enthusiastically about his ideas for power production and storage, suggesting a potential that GM left untapped. (Late in the film, Cocconi says that he and some assistants were able to modify an EV1 to drive 300 miles on a single charge.)
Paine points out that at about the same time as the EV1s were being destroyed, American automakers, oil companies, and the Bush administration began hyping the idea of cars run by hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity and an "exhaust" consisting of pure water. This technology's proponents are quick to remind us that hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and that ample supplies could someday be extracted from water. For now, though, the only way to get pure, usable hydrogen at anything like a realistic price is to extract it from natural gas. In any case, it takes so much energy to produce the hydrogen that it cannot properly be thought of as an energy source at all. It's really just a means of storing the energy that has driven the machines used to produce it - energy which still has to originate from some other source.
The auto industry's big brains say that a commercially viable hydrogen fuel-cell automobile is at least two decades away. Meanwhile, General Motors and others have already proven that battery-powered successors to the EV1 could potentially be on the road right now. Now why in heck would Big Oil and Big Car want to push a technology that won't be ready for at least 20 years, while simultanously ignoring another technology that could threaten the sales of gasoline, mufflers, and oil filters right now? Gee, that's a tough one.
Paine tries to end his film on an optimistic note by reminding us of the growing popularity of gasoline-electric hybrids and explaining the next logical step: the plug-in hybrid, which allows a driver to charge a car's battery overnight, running electric-only on shorter urban jaunts while keeping the gasoline engine in reserve for longer trips and emergencies. Technological progress has always moved in fits and starts, and there's reason to hope that as world oil prices inevitably rise, market forces will spur automakers to overcome their earlier hesitations, much as camera and film companies overcame their initial resistance to digital photography. Someday the EV1 may be remembered as a car just a few years ahead of its time.
Still, it's sobering to reflect on how a technology that could have seriously addressed the world's gravest environmental threats may instead have been kept off the market by a confluence of corporate greed and short-sighted government policy. How can one not be dismayed at the failure of the world's biggest business players to act not only in their customers' interest, but ultimately in their own? Who Killed the Electric Car? does provoke a sense of optimism about some folks' endless ingenuity in creating new tools to improve our lives. Whether homo sapiens, collectively speaking, is smart enough to use these tools to save itself is still an open question.