Review: Who Killed the Electric Car?
Clamor film-reviewer extraordinaire spent time at the Seattle International Film Festival last month, where she saw this and two films examining Guantanamo Bay detention.
Who Killed the Electric Car?
Chris Paine, Director
With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, Sony Picture Classics is betting that summer moviegoers will want to hear about how General Motors developed a fast, stylish electric car, then scuttled every engineering advantage they had gained over their foreign competitors to embrace a gas-guzzling throwback like the Hummer.
Who Killed the Electric Car?, which opened June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, is more than just director Chris Paine’s passionate eulogy for a car he drove and loved. It’s a detailed indictment of how short-sighted management, greed, and ignorance killed automotive innovation.
Faced with an air pollution crisis in 1990, California regulators passed the Zero Emissions Mandate, requiring that 2 percent of the state’s cars be emission-free by 1998 — 10 percent by 2003. It was the most radical smog-fighting mandate since the catalytic converter.
In 1997, GM’s EV1 started appearing on California roads. Paine calls it the perfect car for the modern age. It required no gas, no oil, no mufflers, and no brake changes (a billion dollar industry unto itself). They could hit 60 mph in under 9 seconds. Ford, Honda and Toyota quickly followed suit. Yet six years later, the cars were gone.
Smart and fast-paced, Paine’s documentary builds a case against oil companies, carmakers, and state and federal government with the same methodical care that was used to create his dream car. Nor do car buyers walk away completely blameless. Swayed by questionable advertising, weaker first-generation batteries and limited availability (the EV1 could only be leased not purchased and had a lengthy waiting list for delivery), they failed to embrace the cars as a practical alternative, even though government statistics showed Americans drive an average of only 29 miles a day.
The film touches only lightly on arguments that electric vehicles don’t reduce greenhouse gases because they simply shift the pollution impacts onto power plants.
Despite the EV1’s fate, Paine and his stars are optimistic that the electric car will be back in some form, but the return wave may not be produced here. At the Seattle International Film Festival this month, Wally Rippel — principal power electronics engineer for AeroVironment, a subcontractor on the EV1 project — noted that both China and India are eagerly pursuing research into mass production of electric vehicles.
-Irene Svete