Electric Boogaloo

Occasionally while adding films to my Netflix queue I'll draw a cinematic blank and become completely incapable of thinking of a single movie I'd like to watch.  When this happens my cure is to search out the most esoteric documentary film I can find (the mid 80s are a treasure trove of fantastically bad docudramas) and toss it into the line-up, consequences be damned.  Which is how I ended up watching Who Killed the Electric Car? a few nights ago.  I expected it to be a poorly edited environmental lobby hit-piece with little substance and wildly useless infographics.  What I got wasn't far off, but I was shocked at the amount of actual video footage available from the key moments in the death of the electric car.  Yes, it was poorly edited, and yes it was clearly a film made to make the car companies look awful--not that that's hard or even wrong.  The redeeming qualities of the 113 minute film however were compelling enough that I've been thinking about them for days.  Mostly I've been trying to think of another example of a company actively seeking to "disappear" its own products and prevent them from being sold ever again.  I have yet to come up with one.  GM's destruction of the EV1 stands alone. 

 

    If you didn't live in California during the 90s, it's entirely plausible that you've never even heard of the EV1.  Originally introduced by GM as a concept car called the Impact (Worst.  Name.  Ever.) this completely electric vehicle was an excellent piece of engineering for its day and garnered GM a tremendous amount of positive press when it was unveiled.  Shortly thereafter, inspired by the potential of the Impact, the California Air Resources Board passed a mandate that required major auto manufacturers to make zero-emission vehicles available for sale in California if they wanted to keep selling cars there.  In addition, they had to make those vehicles a growing percentage of their cars sold over time.  GM and the other auto companies complied and thus the EV1 was introduced to the public.  Sort of.  GM refused to build more than a couple thousand of the vehicles and only ever made them available for lease.  Then GM and the other auto manufacturers and someone else…I forget…oh yeah!  The US Federal Government (Thanks again, Bush!) took CARB to court and petitioned for the zero-emission vehicle mandate to be modified to allow hybrid and fuel cell vehicles to count as zero-emission vehicles--they aren't.  Despite an enormous volume of testimony stating that there was no reason to change the mandate, all of which is on film, the board--chaired by the new director of the Fuel Cell Institute--caved and ldid away with the mandate anyway, which is also on film.  The EV1 line was quickly discontinued, the cars were repossessed, and by 2003 the vast majority of them were crushed—again, video evidence of this destruction is ample.  GM cited costs of production and limited consumer interest in the vehicle as the reasons for its discontinuing.  Perhaps if they had built the EV1 on a larger scale and not spent so much time pointing out its limitations in the marketing, these wouldn't have been issues.  The EV1s that were not crushed were put in museums, but not before they'd been completely disabled by GM. 

      Fast forward nearly a decade later and we're still waiting for the auto manufacturers to step up and properly design and bring to market a true electric vehicle.  Sure, they've made an endless amount of noise about hybrids, which give you all of the expense and carbon footprint of battery technology while still consuming a pretty substantial amount of petroleum, but they have refused to bring a true electric vehicle to market.  Which is pretty spectacular given that they could probably make some decent money on them.  American consumers seem willing to buy them despite there not being any available and despite not having experienced them in any meaningful way.   The reason they don't sell an electric car is because in order to do so successfully they would have to cannibalize their existing market.  In order to sell electric vehicles correctly you have to market them in such a way that makes driving a non-electric vehicle as socially unacceptable as littering or smacking your child in public.  The only way to sell what is an undoubtedly more limited vehicle to the American people you must tell them that fuel burning cars are sending billions of dollars to the middle east and giving our children cancer.  You have to make the people driving Hummers look irresponsible.  You have to make the fuel the bad guy.  

     But the car manufacturers won't do that, because they LIKE selling the cars they sell and the parts and service they keep you buying for decades.  And the American government won't force them to because there's too much political money stained with middle eastern oil in Washington.  I'm thrilled to see that Nissan and Chevy will be releasing production models sometime next year, or so they claim, but I'm skeptical that these cars will get the marketing and publicity they deserve.  

 Above: The Chevy Volt due in November 2010 & the Tesla Model S due Spring 2012.

   The electric car is by no means a perfect vehicle.  It's limited range, top speeds, and need to be plugged in every night mean that it is not the solution to this country's energy debacle, but it is a part of that solution.  Were the electric vehicle to become popular with consumers and the manufacturers focused their resources, I have not a doubt in my mind that we would see rapid leaps and bounds in the abilities of these vehicles.  Some day they might even be better than their combustion engine counterparts.  Lets put those in a museum.