Who pulled the plug?
Documentary explores demise of General Motors' EV-1 electric car
By Carrie Rickey
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
A documentary as efficient and zippy as its subject, Who Killed the Electric Car? implicates Big Auto and Big Oil for murdering the commercial prospects of the late, lamented EV-1, which resembled, and actually might have inspired, Lightning McQueen in Cars.
Touted by General Motors as "the automobile of the 21st century," the battery-powered EV-1 literally was consigned to the scrap heap of the late 20th. According to Chris Paine's film, a companion piece to An Inconvenient Truth, 'twas a confederacy of technocrats and bureaucrats that ran this baby off the road.
Featuring a star-studded roster of EV-1 lessees including Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks, Paine's film is part history lesson, part industrial thriller. It is surprising to learn that electric cars are as old as the auto industry, higher-performing, cleaner but more expensive than the fuel-burning counterparts that became standard.
If the EV-1, cute as a VW Beetle but with better acceleration, is the true star of the film, a peppery redhead named Chelsea Sexton is the second lead. Originally a part of GM's EV-1 team, Sexton led protests against her onetime employer when the auto giant failed to get behind its innovative offering.
The quickest way to get manufacturers to oppose innovation -- be it seat belt, airbag or fuel-efficient vehicle -- is to mandate it. And when the state of California mandated that by 1998 2 percent of new vehicles sold had to be exhaust-free, a grudging GM ordered up the EV-1, setting out to fulfill the mandate and to kill it by giving the car a battery good for only 60 miles between recharges.
Because the EV-1 had a battery instead of a fuel-burning engine, it didn't require the parts and maintenance that make up 40 percent of manufacturer profit.
Another reason to fear the EV-1, suggests Sexton, is that marketing it as a clean machine made other GM products look dirty. The petroleum industry feared it because it wasn't oil- dependent.
Paine shows a clip from the 1991 comedy, The Naked Gun 21/2, in which Robert Goulet plays an industrialist named Quentin Hapsburg, a Dr. Evil type who wants to squelch energy-efficient products because they would limit corporate profits. That movie plays for farce what Paine plays for tragedy in his urgent, involving account.
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