Recent viewings

Who Killed the Electric Car? It's hardly unbiased, but this documentary about the electric cars that were produced in the late 1990s as a response to a 1990 California law requiring production of zero-emissions vehicles does an effective job of suggesting that the vehicles had far more potential than they were given credit for. The all-electric General Motors EV-1, and the hamfisted way that GM handled its discontinuance of the model, get the bulk of the moviemakers' attention.

The EV-1, in its most advanced incarnation, reportedly had a driving range of 75-150 miles, with acceleration comparable to many small gas-powered cars of today and a top speed of 80 mph. People who drove them seemed to like them, and of course the car required no gasoline at all, only a nightly battery recharge. GM's marketing support was skimpy, though, and it refused to allow anyone to purchase the cars outright, instead offering them only on closed-end leases which it refused to renew when California's government caved in to corporate pressure and revoked the zero-emissions law. GM then collected all the leased cars, ignored the lessors' pleas to be allowed to purchase them or extend the leases, and in extraordinarily arrogant and tone-deaf fashion crammed them all into a bunch of Darth Vader-black trailers in front of a crowd of indignant supporters, hauled them to a junkyard in the desert and systematically crushed them all, except for a very small number that were merely gutted of their mechanical components and allowed to exist as shells in museums.

Car companies, oil companies, wishy-washy California politicians and a cynical, oil-pushing White House are all tagged "guilty" by the filmmaker. The movie may give short shrift to some of the real technical problems that obstruct wide acceptance of electric cars, such as the problem of making batteries equal to the task of propelling them down the highway for hundreds of miles, recharging quickly, and not degrading as a result of daily charging and discharging. But as gasoline prices continue to rise, environmental problems continue to escalate, and the oil-rich middle East continues to seethe with violence funded by American petrodollars, it becomes more clear every year that the strategy followed by GM and other US automakers, of building ever-bigger, ever-thirstier multi-ton road battleships like the Hummer, cannot continue indefinitely. Vehicles inspired by the EV-1, such as the electric Tesla roadster and the successful hybrids from Toyota and Honda, appear be the cars of the future for commuters and everyone else who doesn't actually need a half-ton of cargo-hauling capacity.

GM recently made a big splash at a Detroit auto show by announcing the Chevy Volt, a flashily-designed hybrid concept car that promises to go 40 miles on electric power, then supplement its batteries with a small gas engine. Its production schedule? Someday. Maybe. At a fancy price.

Meanwhile, the Toyota Priuses and Honda hybrids continue to proliferate, and GM's market share continues to plunge along with its public image. Will GM actually follow through on building the Volt? Or is it just one more vaguely promised concept car, a tease to tantalize gullible consumers and hype-hungry reporters, never to be built? Will the dinosaurs of GM management treat it like the EV-1, producing it for a few years only to yank it back out of their customers' hands a year or two later when gas prices drop momentarily and GM thinks it can go back to making massive markups on equally massive 12-mpg SUVs? Who knows? The history isn't encouraging.

By strangling its own infant in the crib, GM may have fatally sabotaged the survival of its family of brands. Who Killed the Electric Car may, eventually, be viewed as a documentary about the means by which a once-great business initiated its own destruction.