Review: Who Killed The Electric Car?

Posted on January 5, 2007
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This is a great documentary, now out on dvd, that thoroughly covers the shenanigans around the birth and death of the electric car, the EV1 from General Motors Saturn division in the late-1990s to early 2000s. It’s really worth a look.

The film conveys the kind of excitement an auto buff feels at an auto show, but with a great environmental twist. The people who managed to get their hands on these cars really loved them. Of course they were way cool. Very quiet operation, no tailpipe emissions, great acceleration, some really amazing technologies went into these cars.

The movie shows the effects of political and corporate short-sightedness, as California abandoned laws that required zero emissions vehicles (ZEV) to be a modest percent of all cars sold in the state, and the George W. Bush administration files a friend of the court brief in GM and Chrysler’s suit against the state saying that California’s ZEV (that’s E is for emissions, folks) represents regulation of fuel economy standards which can only be done by the feds. The govt. short-sightedness clearly has played out in terms of U.S. energy dependence as well.

Corporate short-sightedness can be seen in GM’s current bottom line. Toyota is poised to eclipse them in world sales, and it is Toyota that continued to produce low-emissions, fuel efficient cars. It’s not clear if GM could be turning a profit on EVs yet, but it’s clear that they’ve wasted 10 years fighting against the inevitable. Now they’re playing catch-up in the hybrid market, but have stated that their hybrids will be plug-ins when they arrive. (That’s an ev with a back-up gasoline engine.)

Toyota and the other automakers don’t get off the hook. They all played the game that GM played to varying degrees. It may be because of GMs success with the EV1 that they get so much of the flack. The bizarre problem was, the carmakers never wanted success. It reminds me of another car film, Tucker,a drama about the creator of a car by that name, set in the 1940s, that sought to show how slow to change the auto industry can (still) be.

For myself, I’ve decided not to buy any more new cars until I can get at least a production plug-in hybrid. I wouldn’t knock bio-diesel, but I’d want to burn 100 percent renewable, carbon neutral fuel. That’s not very practical at the moment, as I don’t really have time to manage french-fry grease-based transportation.

With an electric, the power comes off the grid, and the grid can be converted to wind and renewables. With a bit of new infrastructure, we could all be driving virtual sail-cars.