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Who Killed The Electric Car? [2006]


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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk

It begins with a solemn funeral…for a car. By the end of Chris Paine's lively and informative documentary, the idea doesn't seem quite so strange. As narrator Martin Sheen notes, "They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline." Paine proceeds to show how this unique vehicle came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California's Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person's terms (director Alex Gibney, Oscar-nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, served as consulting producer). And everyone gets the chance to have their say: engineers, politicians, protesters, and petroleum spokespeople--even celebrity drivers, like Peter Horton, Alexandra Paul, and a wild man beard-sporting Mel Gibson. But the most persuasive participant is former Saturn employee Chelsea Sexton. Promoting the benefits of the EV1 was more than a job to her, and she continues to lobby for more environmentally friendly options. Who Killed the Electric Car? is, otherwise, a tremendously sobering experience. --Kathleen C. Fennessy


Eye opener but narrow in focus
Review date: 2008-08-27 Rating: 8 out of 10

This was an eye-opener for me. I got it on the back of a generally greeny-liberal temperament, concerned about increasing fuel prices and global warming, and wondering what the alternatives were. I found the behaviour of big business so bizarre it left me with the niggling suspiciion that the fossil-fueled vehicle on the drive was only there because of a global industrial conspiracy. But as demand drives supply (or so I learned at school), electric alternatives should be becoming increasingly common as oil prices surge ever upwards.

There is, however, another problem. Towards the end of the film there is a brief clip with a billboard in the background, advertising (I think) public transport). It proclaimed, "Ensuing no-one in LA needs to walk again". There are frequent clips of clogged freeways and traffic jams. And (using the motor industry's own conceit) clips of EV-1s and other electric cars heading down deserted highways in the middle of the wilderness.

Electric cars aren't going to be a panacea, but the film does become rather evangelical - it becomes almost a hymn to the EV-1. Electric cars may not produce pollution as they drive down the road, but they are just as guilty of all the other negatives of motorised transport - death and injury, the fracturing of society by the development of commercial and social infrastructure that demands the use of individual motorised transport. And at present electric cars can only be an option for affluent and articulate middle classes.

At that point the film failed for me - it made a very good point about the domination of the transport economy by big business. And I would agree that electric cars can and should be part of the solution. A more balanced view, however, would be to put the EV-1 and its stablemates in the context of a menu of transport choices that includes public transportation, cycling and (even in LA) walking.

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Reviews


Great documentary, interesting and informative
Review date: 2008-04-09 Rating: 8 out of 10

Very interesting documentary about the coming and going - very soon afterwards - of the Electric car to the US. It must have been quite a threat to some very paranoid and short sighted people to have wanted an electric car off the road so quickly. The good news is that we are not sitting around waiting for big business to solve our transport problems for us. Instead, necessity being the mother of invention, there are some clever but small businesses coming up with viable alternatives, check out the Water4gas website. Or more radical still have a look at the magnetic motors being demonstrated on Youtube.

Let's suck some serious amps
Review date: 2007-12-06 Rating: 8 out of 10

Probably the most alarming thing about this story of how the electric car was literally destroyed is what it reveals about the power of corporations to control our lives. Film maker Chris Paine, himself an EV1 owner, makes it clear that it was big corporations, especially big oil, and most especially General Motors itself, that woke up one day and asked themselves the multi-billion dollar question: Is an economical and efficient electric vehicle really good for business? In the case of the oil companies, obviously not since such a vehicle would not be burning any gas or needing any motor oil. In the case of the car manufacturers themselves, especially GM, which actually spent some very serious bucks on developing the EV1, the answer came as a bit of a surprise. First of all, they asked themselves, in the long run are you going to make more money building small efficient vehicles or behemoths like the Hummer? It didn't take long for them to figure out that the profit margins would be higher with the bigger vehicles. And then they realized that with the EV1 they wouldn't be able to sell many of their combustion-engine parts like oil filters and such. Furthermore, the EV1 was built to comply with California law. Doing some more thinking, GM realized that it would never do to allow some state government to tell them what to manufacture. If things worked out in California, before you know it, the whole nation might very well go plug-in.

So, as shown so vividly in this documentary, the car manufactures and the oil companies bought up or scared enough politicians so that the law requiring zero emissions in California went the way of the dodo. Meanwhile GM, which had been leasing the EV1, recalled them all and literally destroyed them. Paine has some nice footage showing the brand new and near brand new cars being crushed while EV1 lovers protested in vain. Nationally of course we know about the bills congress passed allowing truck-sized vehicles to continue to guzzle gas (mostly SUVs) and how 6,000-pound vehicles were given massive tax breaks for small business owners (mostly anybody but a wage earner).

There is of course plenty of controversy about whether the story presented by Paine (narration by Martin Sheen, by the way) is fair and accurate. I did a little research--there is a ton of information on the Web--and what became obvious after not too long was that the electric car not only is a viable alternative to the combustion engine car but really is the wave of the future whether General Motors and the other car manufacturers know it or not. For now, however, they are not about to change their ways. They have too much of a vested interest in business as it is.

The hydrogen fuel cell red herring is addressed, and, with help from Joseph J. Romm, who wrote The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate (2004), which I highly recommend, got fed to the dogs. Naturally there is a clip of George W. Bush pretending to support the hydrogen fuel cell car, even though I am sure he knows that economically it's not even close to a match for the electric car. Getting the Great Prevaricator to advance the propaganda put out by the oil and vehicle companies surely is something close to proof positive that it's BS.

Especially watchable is the clip from Huell Howser's PBS show in which we get to see the EV1s not only being crushed but pulverized into little bits for recycling.

So, what's it all about, Alfie? It's just as Eisenhower warned: beware not just of the industrial-military complex taking over our lives, but beware of corporations in general buying up all the politicians and writing all the laws. In fact, with the way the mass electorate is influenced by advertizing, only politicians pre-approved through campaign donations from big corporations have a chance of even getting the nomination of either of the two main political parties. And without that nomination, effectively speaking, they can't win.

Regardless of all the machinations by GM, et al., I think our grandchildren will be driving mostly electric vehicles with nary a gas station in sight. And they will be inundated with "green" ads in the media with lots of flowers and little girls paid for by General Motors and Toyota, telling us how they are responsible for the shiny, new clean world.

Bush Barbarism!!!
Review date: 2007-10-09 Rating: 8 out of 10

This is an average documentary considering the interesting subject matter. The facts are not in dispute. America's present administration seems to be doing all it can to bring us closer to annihilation by any means necessary.

The Documentary is a paint by numbers exploration of the insanity involved in scraping what could have been a much-needed revolution in the motor industry. The Electric Car.

The criminality involved in its eventual disappearance is sinister in the extreme yet most of what the present American administration gets up to is succinctly sinister.

The dismantling and destruction of California's Tram system by General Motors was a shocking revelation. The DVD extras meanly expand on that subject by showing a clip from another documentary.

My main problem with the documentary as a whole was trying to understand the interviewees. American English has become so hard to understand because of the trend in speaking from the very back of the throat. As Bush Jr. proves diction and eloquence have indeed become a rare commodity in that part of the world.

GM EV-1 ,we will not forget you
Review date: 2007-08-22 Rating: 10 out of 10

This great documentary, directed by Chris Paine shows the last days of the electric cars being dramatically taken from their owners to be destroyed.

I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in electric vehicles and being non Dependant on petrol.

I heard about this documentary in several internet pages discussing cars with low environmental impact, and it took me a while to get it, I bought form amazon.com (USA) region 1 and had to watch it in my computer.

I am glad this is now available in region 2 at a reasonable price (marketplace that is ).

The people who owned the cars felt very passionately about them and had real love for their cars and for they represented, it is heart breaking to see them being taken away in front of their eyes and how General Motors did its utmost to shred to small pieces.

The movie then goes to explore the several factors involved in the making of electric cars and the future possibilities of it ,including new batteries and solar panels , needless to say the car and oil industry will try very hard for them not the be available for the general public for a long time.

Sadly for us in Europe the range of electric cars is appallingly bad, there nothing but a glorified children's toy with an incredible short range and they look ugly, they are also most impractical.

There are some "super-hybrid" (125 mpg , plug-in hybrid with a range of 60 miles on electric ) cars that will be launched in them market before 2010 ,but nothing compared to the beauty of the GM EV-1 which hit the roads in 1996.

I feel that the oil and car industry killed the electric car but maybe in the , no so far , future the electric car will kill the oil industry and I hope to be around to watch it .

Product Details/Specifications


Director(s):

Recording label: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
EAN: 5035822497030
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL, Widescreen,
Release date: 2007-03-19
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Audience rating: Universal, suitable for all
Region code: 2
Running time: 89 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2006
Language: Hindi (Subtitled)
Language: English (Original Language)

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