By Geoff Pevere
July 14, 2006
"Who Killed The Electric Car?"
The adorable talking automobiles of Cars notwithstanding, this summer's most impressive act of vehicular anthropomorphism is the scene in Chris Paine's documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? when we see a field of slick little, gas-free General Motors EV1 cars being mercilessly crushed into mangled metal cubes. Darned if it isn't like watching R2-D2 being reprocessed into aluminum siding.
Made by the former EV1-owner Paine (and produced by the former EV1 owner Dean Devlin), Who Killed the Electric Car? is at once personal (featuring lots of interviews with the director's former EV1-owning celebrity friends) and crusadingly political. It's about how the sporty-looking emission-free mid-1990s cars — which got 70 to 120 miles per charge — became former in the first place, and it asks not only the question who killed it but why?
Proceeding from the not entirely uncontroversial presumption that the world is very quickly choking to death on its own non-sustainable gas fumes (at times the movie feels like a sidebar companion to both The Corporation and An Inconvenient Truth), Paine's disarmingly impassioned movie sees nothing but short-term sinister interests behind the forced disappearance of a viably long-term solution.
The EV1 (which had the forebodingly ill-advised commercial name The Impact) was such a necessary and forward-thinking idea, its removal from the market and road was nothing short of an act of corporate sabotage.
Tracing the history of electric cars back to the 1920s, when it was first extinguished by ample oil resources and the Model T, Paine's movie really hits its conspiratorial stride in the early 1990s, with the State of California's Air Resources Board's "Zero Emission Mandate." Calling for a minimum of 2 per cent emission-free vehicles on California roads by 1998 and 10 per cent by 2003, the legislation kick-started a vigorous campaign on the part of major car manufacturers to come up with cars to meet the mandate.
But it was GM's EV1 that shot ahead of the pack: a sexily streamlined little two-seater that hummed almost silently and looked engineered for the new millennium.
The EV1 was quickly a favourite toy of the California's liberal glitterati: Tom Hanks is seen singing its praises on The David Letterman Show, a seamanly-looking Mel Gibson fondly remembers his, and Peter Horton is seen standing sadly by as his becomes one of the very last recalled and towed away to oblivion.
That GM could recall every single one of its electric cars — they were only leased and never sold — is merely one of the movie's pieces of evidence that the fix might have been in for the EV1 well before the first charger ever slipped into its dock. Never a popular idea with car manufacturers, oil companies, conservative politicians or even consumers (who, the movie suggests, were deliberately kept in the dark as to the EV1's potential), the quiet little car was forced off the road almost as soon as it took off. The Zero Emission Mandate was repealed, the environmentally unfriendly Bush administration arrived, and GM cancelled its emission-free EV1 program. Worse, the company then tracked down every single one of the cars, towed them away and crushed them.
Structured as a documentary murder mystery, with each suspect in the EV1's "murder" being investigated and pegged with a motive, Who Killed the Electric Car? makes no bones about the fact that something stinks in the story of the sudden demise of the car that came by the too-fitting name of The Impact. And it smells a lot like gasoline.
