F I L M R E V I E W
Who Killed the Electric Car?
If there is anything the planet and the American republic desperately needs, it is an electric car. The introduction of the hybrid electric car a decade or so ago was instantly popular. It seemed novel and ingenious, it was neither.
One hundred years ago most cars were electric. Drivers preferred them over the noisy, fume-spewing, gasoline-powered versions. Electrically powered transportation, including public electric transportation, then met a fate similar to what it met again in 2005. However, in 2005 it was much more direct, swift, complete, and telling.
The film Who Killed The Electric Car? (Sony Classics) tells the story of the development of the answer to ending America’s oil wars and the beginning of the answer to global warming. It is also the story of America’s biggest problem—the power of the oil companies and the incompetence of the automobile companies.
In response to California’s 1990’s mandate to require 10 percent of its state fleet to be no-emission vehicles, GM began developing an all-electric car. The result was the EV1, a vehicle that all those selected to lease or test-drive it daily, raved about. It was fast, silent, powerful, great to drive, plenty of range for commuters, rechargeable at home or at charging stations, offered independence from the oil companies and produced no emissions.
So what’s to not like? The oil companies feared losing markets and GM was just another head-up-its-butt dinosaur of an automobile company, building the same gas-guzzling antiquated engine they were building 100 years earlier. The oil companies had no problem with that. They still had trillions of barrels of oil to drill and make billions of dollars from, which in the U.S. largely means extracting it from publicly “owned” resources.
The EV1 makes the new GM Volt look like what it is—a compromise with the oil companies. A gas-powered car, dependent on oil, with laughable gas efficiency given the immediacy of what American citizens face in the Middle East, and the world faces in the atmosphere.
How these enormously powerful industries negatively impact our lives is demonstrated in this documentary. The oil company propaganda machine, and the complicit automobile engine companies put together a coalition that literally crushes the beginning of the answer to our globe’s worst problem.
Sony Pictures Classics, 93 minutes