How the ‘Electric Car’ got unplugged
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
Kansas City Star
You don’t have to be a fan of murder mysteries to get wrapped up in “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
A passing interest in breathable air, renewable resources and efficient transportation ought to make this documentary required viewing.
Chris Paine’s film is insightful, informative and, as far as I can tell, scrupulously fair. All sides of the issue get to state their case. Nevertheless, you’ll come away with a pretty good idea of who the culprits are.
The story (narrated by Martin Sheen) began more than a decade ago when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a measure requiring that by 1998, 2 percent of new vehicles sold had to be exhaust-free.
General Motors responded with the EV1, an all-electric car that looked great, drove like a charm and didn’t pollute. The EV1’s main drawback was that it could go only 100 miles before recharging.
Nevertheless, every EV1 that came off the assembly line was snapped up by environmentally conscious Californians (many of them stars like Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks). GM didn’t sell the electric cars, it leased them — a curious policy that would reverberate later on.
The heroine of the film is Chelsea Sexton, a young woman who joined GM’s EV1 team and fell in love with the vehicles. She becomes our eyewitness guide to forces that coalesced (dare we say conspired?) to kill the electric car.
According to Sexton, even as it was promoting the EV1, GM was ensuring it would be taken off the road. Not the least of these was to persuade CARB to rescind its requirements about increasing the number of non-polluting cars. And once that was done, Sexton and the other EV1 staff members were fired.
Then, as the leases ran out, GM began reclaiming the EV1s, refusing to sell them to users who had gone gaga for the model. A GM spokesman tells us that those cars would be studied by GM engineers. In fact, Paine flew over a GM testing facility in the Arizona desert and photographed dozens of EV1s crushed and awaiting shredding.
It appears that GM wanted to eliminate any record of electric cars on California’s roads.
Every murder mystery needs a list of suspects, and this one has plenty:
• GM, which didn’t want to make an electric car in the first place and then realized that, unlike the internal combustion engine, electric cars are cheap to service and almost never need spare parts. And the fact that the EV1 was “clean” meant that the rest of the GM fleet was “dirty.”
• The oil industry. One of Paine’s subjects talks about having to live with $2-a-gallon gasoline. If only.
• The Bush administration, which the film accuses of pulling a bait-and-switch by pushing hydrogen fuel cell cars while ignoring electric ones. Paine presents a daunting list of reasons why hydrogen-powered cars won’t be coming any time soon, and why they’ll be impossibly expensive to operate.
• The California Air Resources Board, which by any reading of the record folded in the face of auto industry complains.
• The rest of us. American consumers went SUV mad at precisely the wrong time for our environment, oil dependency and economy.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
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