Who Killed the Electric Car?

The poor little electric car never had a chance. GM made only one mistake. When the California Air Resources Board (CARB) told automakers in the mid-1990s that they had to make ten percent of their fleet “zero pollution at the tailpipe” by 2002, GM turned the project over to its Saturn Division, which actually thought its job was to build a great electric car. Before GM realized its mistake, Saturn had done just that and leased several hundred of them to drivers in Southern California.

Within a few years, hundreds of fully electric EV-ls were in use on the roads and freeways of SoCal. What’s amazing is not so much that GM recalled the cars from loyal owners and buried the project, but that they did such a good job of burying the story.

It took a few years in the late 1990s for the automakers and oil companies to stack CARB with their sycophants and get the new standards eliminated. Once they did, they began to call in the leases on the EV-ls. By 2004, GM had recalled all their electric cars and actually crushed them in wrecking yards. Today, there is only one known EV-1 in an auto museum, and it’s just a shell. The motor, batteries, and drive train have been removed.

The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? tells the story through interviews with owners, engineers, Saturn executives, and former CARB board members, as well as lots of footage of the cars on the road. The film can be rather depressing, as these David and Goliath stories usually are (only in the Bible did David win), but it’s a fascinating study and it ends with two hopeful notes: one, hybrid electrics aren’t as good as a totally electric car, but the automakers are willing to produce them; and, two, with a Democratic majority in Congress, we might still see more on the electric car.

And if you thought you already hated the Bush administration, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I highly recommend Who Killed the Electric Car, available through Netflix and your local video store.