"Who Killed The Electric Car?"
3 Stars
July 7, 2006
If timing is everything, then filmmaker Chris Paine could not have picked a better season to release his muckraking documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?. With gas prices at record highs and much of the world finally copping to both the reality of global warming and the fact that petroleum is a finite resource, the time might be right for an automobile that can plug in and go, but as Paine's film relates, GM, Toyota, and others developed the technology, even produced cars, but then literally pulled the plug on their own grand experiment.
Paine, who himself once drove one of GM's sporty EV-1s, frames his investigation as a detective story. It's the bad guy in Michael Moore's Roger & Me, GM's Roger Smith, who is somewhat of the hero here, the man who first proposed the development of a car that could run on batteries instead of gas. The result was the EV-1, which became a darling amongst the Hollywood set. Among those who eventually came to lease the cars (GM refused to sell them) were Mel Gibson, Ed Begley Jr., Baywatch babe Alexandra Paul, former thirtysomething star Peter Horton, and Electric Car executive producer Dean Devlin (whose normal milieu is blockbuster fare, such as Independence Day and The Patriot), a man so enamored of the car that he named his production company Electric Entertainment.
But after the California Air Resource Board decreed that the companies start producing more of the electric autos to aid the state in its ongoing battle with pollution, the automakers fought back. Eventually, they took their cars back—one of the film's most poignant scenes has Horton, the very last person to possess an EV-1, waiting on the repo man—and destroyed them. As the country debates hybrids vs. hydrogen-fuel-cell cars (technology that is decades away, if it can ever be made practical), it's almost as if the electric car never existed.
The film aims to rectify that. Paine interviews a wide range of interested parties, from drivers to scientists to people like Chelsea Sexton, who was part of GM's EV-1 sales team, and who remains a committed believer. Paine's camera is on the spot as the car's fans blockade a GM lot to try to keep the company from trucking the last of the vehicles away, but he also lets the GM executives tell their side of the story. It's obvious which side Paine is on, but he stresses that a lot of different people were involved with killing the electric car, like automakers and people in the oil industry. Government indifference certainly contributed, and consumers also played a role: The failure of the electric car coincides with the off-the-charts success of the gas-guzzling SUV.
A documentary about a car may not sound like the most scintillating movie on the planet, but Paine is a skillful storyteller who spins his yarn with surprising humor. There's outrage, too, and a lot of facts and figures, but Who Killed the Electric Car? isn't just good for you. It's actually good.
— PAM GRADY
