June 30, 2006
Transcript of Lou Dobbs Appearance
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN ANCHOR: Well, the Ford Motor Company is canceling its plans to boost production of hybrid vehicles. Ford promised last fall to sell 250,000 hybrids a year, and now Ford says it will focus on vehicles that run on alternative fuels such as ethanol instead. Now, Detroit has lagged far behind Japanese automakers in hybrid vehicles. This is the not first time American automakers have failed, or some say refuse, to invest in innovation.
A new documentary accuses Detroit of deliberately blocking production of pollution-free cars and the film asks the question, "Who Killed the Electric Car"?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What killed the electric vehicle, very simply, I think, is lack of corporate wisdom.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In my opinion, it's big oil that killed the electric car.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Allen Lloyd killed the electric car program. I was there when he did it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The California Air Resources Board killed the electric car under huge pressure from the auto companies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They were an accessory to the murder, but the murder was committed by the General Motors Company.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PILGRIM: Chris Paine, the director of the film "Who Killed the Electric Car" joins me now from Los Angeles.
And, Chris, thank you very much for being with us.
CHRIS PAINE, "WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR": Thank you, Kitty.
PILGRIM: You know, Chris, you wanted major investigative news programs to do this story, and they didn't. What was it that you think the American public needs to know?
PAINE: Well, I think most people didn't even know there were electric cars, which is kind of crazy, because these cars were developed here in the United States, and they put them on the roads in California, like thousands of them, thanks to a California law, which they passed, saying that if you wanted to sell cars in California, some of those cars had to be electric.
And I got one of those cars, and I was amazed at how good the car was. And when they took the cars off the road five years later and began destroying them, I thought, well, this is a story every American probably wants to know.
PILGRIM: Let's -- you know, one of the possible killers, or you point out that in your view one of the possible killers of electric cars is oil companies and we have a clip from a prominent engineer. Let's listen to that for a second.
PAINE: OK.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's still roughly a trillion barrels worth of oil in the earth's crust, and if you figure that the average price of that subsequent oil will be $100 a barrel, that's $100 trillion worth of business yet to be done. However, at some point when an alternative is good enough, people will snap over, and that's what the oil companies fear the most.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PILGRIM: Now, some can spin this into a conspiracy theory. Others can say, look, it's just market forces. It's cheap and it's plentiful at this point, oil. Why did you want to bring this out, this point?
PAINE: Well, you know, the fact is, is that all of the United States is on oil for pushing cars around, which is just crazy, because we have plenty of domestic electricity to do it. And if you look at the marketplace today, there are no plug-in versions of cars you can drive, and this is insane, because oil price are going up.
And we have the technology to put battery-powered electric cars on. They might not be for everybody, but there should below an option in the marketplace. And we took on the oil industry in the film because they took on the electric cars. They said, we shouldn't build charging stations, and they really got in the way of this innovation.
PILGRIM: Fascinating stuff. Let's also look at the role of government in your film, and the film addresses it extensively. It says that the government really had a role in developing alternative fuel cars and then basically failed to put them out for the American public. And we have another clip from a leading expert on the issue on the environment. And let's listen to that clip.
PAINE: Sure.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For eight, nine years, we spent about $1 billion of the taxpayers' money to develop hybrid vehicles and ironically, the U.S. car companies didn't put any hybrids on the road and, the fact, the minute George Bush got elected president, the U.S. car companies walked away from hybrids.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PILGRIM: Is this a failure of government, Chris?
PAINE: Well, I really think it is, you know. The government did something good in terms of getting carmakers to put electric cars on the road and hybrids and so forth, but they backed down. They backed down because there was so much pressure on them. In California, the federal government, the Bush administration, sued California, said you cannot dictate to have changes to miles per gallon cars on the road, so effectively killing the car program.
And the deal is, is that government can make a difference, and especially when you have cars made in America using domestic U.S. energy, let's put those cars on the road and give the car industry and the oil industry a little push from the government to make it happen.
PILGRIM: You know what strikes me about this whole thing is, an electric car is basically a zero-emissions car. How soon do you think we might see this? This is very, very needed.
PAINE: Well, I got my electric car in 1997. And the EV-1 that GM did was an amazing car. It could go 180 miles an hour if you took the regulator off it. Really, really fast. And then you just plug it in your garage at home.
I think that as Americans sit back and start importing more and more of these cars from Japan, the carmakers will understand that electric hybrids can make them a lot of money. I just wish we didn't have to wait.
PILGRIM: Well, I -- we don't recommend you take the regulator off your car and go 180 miles an hour, but we certainly applaud you taking it off this movie and we hope it does extremely well.
Thanks very much for joining us, Chris Paine.
PAINE: I hope people get to see the film. Thank you.
