Electric Car a Gas-Powered Mystery

The EV1 from General Motors was fast. The EV1 produced no emissions whatsoever. The EV1 was built using the most advanced technology in the automotive industry. The EVI was such an addictive automotive driving experience those who owned it didn’t want to ever give their cars up.

And yet give them up they did, GM taking back all of the cars leased to California drivers during the late 1990’s crushing the entire fleet out in the wilds of the Arizona desert near their prototype testing facilities. As fast as it hit the highways the EV1 just as quickly disappeared from the automotive landscape, the electric car nothing more than a phantom streaking through the memories of those who loved them dearly.

The fabulous new documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” tells the story of one of the greatest murders in corporate American history. Like a great literary mystery by Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler, director Chris Paine (himself a former EV1 driver) attempts to unravel a tangled web of intrigue and deception and uncover exactly why this phenomenally well engineered car vanished so suddenly. What he discovers is a Byzantine network of guilt where everyone, including viewers, find themselves more than a little bit culpable for the electric car’s demise.

What struck me the most about watching this movie is just how stuck in the 20^th Century the United States really is. Paired with Al Gore’s equally damning (and equally stunning) global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” this flick showcases just how out of touch (and behind Asia) domestic auto makers really are. Asian countries have emission and fuel efficiency standards greatly exceeding our own, companies based in the region forced to produce vehicles that surpass them in order to get authorization to sell them.

The electric car, while I’m sure far from perfect (nothing really is after all), had no emissions and no problems with fuel efficiency as it didn’t run on gas. What more, thanks to their record-breaking concept car, GM had a huge advantage on the competition with the EV1. When the California Air Resource Board (CARB) passed the toughest emissions standards in the country (2% of new vehicles sold in California has to be emission free by 1998, 10% by 2003) the automotive giant was ready to go with their car long before the other U.S. car companies could even find the gas pedal.

Six years later the cars are gone and the mandate forcing them to be produced has been amended. What happened? Paine goes to great lengths to find out, interviewing CARB board members, EV1 designers, environmentalists, politicians, automotive executives, former EV1 drivers (including Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks and Alexandra Paul), automotive retailers and many others to gain insights into who really was to blame for the car’s demise. The truth of what he finds, a truth with no real end in sight, almost curdles the blood. In fact, there are so many guilty parties here that the whole gosh darn mess borders on becoming horrifically laughable in its tragedy.

The film is filled with plenty of priceless moments both entertaining and illuminating, the best of the bunch going beyond these emotions to become something altogether unique unto themselves. GM turning down $1.9 million to return a handful of EV1’s to willing customers, a sea of crushed cars piled neatly one on top of the other in the middle of the desert, the bursting of the battery scapegoat by scientist Stanford R. Oushinky; these moments and more burn into your head like a humorously awful bad dream that refuses to release its iron grip upon a person’s nightmares.

But this documentary is more than just a complaint box for former EV1 customers upset their car was relegated to the dustbin. Paine lets absolutely no one off of the hook here. The Bush administration may get a bitter broadside but that doesn’t mean the director lets either Clinton or Gore off the hook. CARB, especially their former chairman Alan C. Lloyd, Ph. D., also gets it pretty good from Paine, the director letting the former politico’s own words defending his own bizarrely inept actions speak for themselves.

Oil companies and consumers are also found guilty, but the latter gets at least the stamp of mitigating circumstances after their verdict is read, primarily thanks to the actions of the former. California Against Hidden Taxes may have sounded like a grassroots organization, but in reality it was a fully funded by the Western Petroleum Association, making their supposedly non-partisan claims that the electric car was “elitist” sound downright laughable in retrospect.

In the end, though, the EV1 may have ended up being just enough ahead of its time for its own good. That fact doesn’t make the mystery surrounding its death any less pathetic, and it certainly isn’t a reason to forgive what happened, but in a 21^st Century world so beholden to industry and resources that came of age in the millennium before it that just might be the one truth that gets straight to the heart of the matter. But no matter what your conclusion one thing is certainly true: With gas at almost $4 per gallon, doesn’t an electric car costing next to nothing to charge sound pretty good right about now?