Who Killed the Electric Car?: the review

Darin and I discussed where to go for Date Night. “I know, I know,” he said, “Pirates.”

“Actually, I’d rather see Who Killed the Electric Car?”

(Pause.) “Really? So would I.”

So we went. And when we walked out, Darin said, “I’m really beginning to hate cars.”

Who Killed the Electric Car? is the story of GM’s experiment with a car that ran on electricity, the EV-1. The people who made it, the people who drove it, and the people who regulated it in (and out) of existence. There are EV-1 fanatics, who begged and pleaded with GM to be allowed to keep their car, there are engineers who are working on making electric auto technology ever more fabulous, and there are the automotive/petroleum company spokesmen who simply ooze, well, slickness as they lie, and lie, and lie.

California, the largest market in the nation, passed a law saying a certain percentage of cars on California roads had to be zero emission by 2000. GM, which had developed an electric car, turned it into a consumer item, the EV-1. They were evidently hard to get, because GM didn’t want customers to have them: they wanted to fight the legislation instead. Eventually the California Air Resources Board (CARB) caved, seduced by the promise of hydrogen fuel cells, and GM (and the other auto makers, who’d jumped into the market) killed their electric cars. They didn’t just pull the leases and take the cars back, they crushed and shredded them, wanting to ensure that they never got out there again.

The film goes through a list of suspects in the murder—consumers, Big Auto, Big Oil, the consumers, CARB, hydrogen fuel cells (which, if you don’t already know, are a gigantic chimera that are going nowhere fast), batteries. And the answer is pretty much a Murder on the Orient Express solution (with the exception of one suspect, which hilariously gets a “Not Guilty”).

At the end there’s an upbeat, optimistic look at the future, with hybrids and plug-in hybrids that get 125 mpg and other technologies coming down the pike. Which, after the depressing movie we’d just watched, was a nice way to end it. (Not very realistic, of course: the answer to our problems is not more single-passenger vehicles, but a start at any rate.)

The bit from an old newsreel about how the discovery of new oil fields in Iraq will bring that nation so many good things was hilarious.

The movie overall is rougher than some other commercially released documentaries we’ve seen (such as An Inconvenient Truth) but it’s very entertaining and told me quite a few things I didn’t know, despite living in California. Definitely recommended.