An Important New Documentary
Who Killed
the Electric Car?
Many audience members watching the previews that accompanied the showings of the recent, much-heralded film of Al Gore's lucid and alarming examination of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, found themselves riveted by a trailer for another film that promised to tell the story of a murder not unrelated to the larger story they were at the theater that night to learn about. It is a whodunit of a different sort, not set at an English manor house with a suspicious butler or among corrupt L.A. cops. Its title is Who Killed the Electric Car? , and its victim is a zero-emissions technology that for a few years held the promise of creating a beachhead for non-polluting vehicles within the American automobile industry. Ironically it was created in response to the very problem that the Gore film spends two-and-a-half hours so carefully illustrating: the runaway build-up of the greenhouse gases that are ever more quickly destabilizing the Earth's climate.
Every gallon of gas from the internal-combustion engine adds nineteen pounds of carbon dioxide to the earth's atmosphere. At that rate it isn't difficult to see why the average driver contributes just under five-and-a-half tons of CO2 to our air in the course of a year: then multiply that times all the drivers in, say, San Diego, and the scope of the problem becomes even clearer. The electric car, by contrast, produces no emissions at all. A General Motors demonstration model at a car show in Los Angeles in 1990 inspired the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to adopt the toughest standards that had ever been established in the nation. It mandated that by 1998, 2% of all the vehicles sold in California should be Zero-Emission Vehicles (ZEVs). By 2003, that figure was to rise to 10%
Two things began to happen almost immediately. One, sincere proponents of the new technology within GM especially began to establish a way to test its viability, a challenge because it would require a non-existent infrastructure to be put in place that would allow the vehicles to be recharged when they were on the road. Two, forces were mobilized from other quarters, some of them also within GM, that sought to declaw the CARB mandate, to undercut the efforts of the proponents and to marginalize the new vehicle. (At first it was called the Impact , perhaps not the most fortunate name for an automobile; it later became known as the EV1, for Electric Vehicle One .) .
We might never have known much about how the second group was able to murder the infant in its cradle, as William Blake might have put it, nor about how successful were the efforts of the proponents, had the initial consumer test of EV1 not been set up in Los Angeles where one of the most enthusiastic participants was a filmmaker named Chris Paine.
“As we put the whole chain of events together, I realized our tale was a lot more than just a car story. It demonstrated why America is having such a
Electric vehicles use less nonrenewable energy than they conserve. While ethanol appears to be “green” fuel, the intensive agriculture practices involved in growing and processing corn and other grains use high energy and create high pollution. Ethanol benefi ts agribusiness more than it benefits the US consumer or the environment.
tough time getting out of the 20th century and breaking it’s addiction to gasoline.”
—Director Chris Paine
See the interview with Chelsea Sexton of PlugInAmerica.com
Ethanol Compared with EVs:
— Ethanol made from corn uses as much nonrenewable energy to produce as the renewable energy that can be derived from it.Hybrids Compared with EVs
— The EV produced no emissions at the tailpipe, whereas the hydrid is still a gasoliine user and CO2 producer.
— The hybrid is considered the practical transition to future zero-emission technology, but the EV just as feasibly could have played a major part in the transition as well.Biodiesel Compared With EVs
— Biodiesel is a promising alternative fuel that is not yet widely adopted or available. The EV was an alternative technology that already was available, and demonstrable
delivered on its promises.All photos this section courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
In 1997, a year after the program was initiated, Paine leased one of the all-electric cars from GM. He had never been a car guy, but the EV1 changed all that. “It was quiet, fast, ran without exhaust and meant that I would never have to go to the gas station again. It made me feel like the 21 st century had arrived. I thought it would be my second car, but within days it was my first car. I drove it everywhere. And everywhere I went, people wanted to ride in it. Three dollars to fill up on electricity and you charged it overnight. I quickly joined the ranks of those who had driven and loved electric cars.”
He drove the car, happily, until in 2003, it was recalled. The cars had all been leased; there was no option to buy. In fact, to his dismay, Paine discovered that the prototypes were not even being warehoused for further study or in preparation for another program—or even for a time when gas prices might climb to $3.95 a gallon. Rather, they were being shipped to a GM's Mesa Proving Grounds in Arizona, where they were shredded and literally turned to powder. This wasn't just a policy decision, he realized, this was murder. And if he couldn't keep his beloved car, at least he could use the power of documentary film to tell the story of how that murder was accomplished. Hence' Who Killed the Electric Car?
In this goal, he was joined by other equally frustrated devotees like producer Dean Devlin who ultimately joined with Paine in creating the film. “For those of us who drove and loved these cars,” says Devlin, “it was enormously frustrating because this story was never told in the press. We couldn't understand why. Every time the story of the electric vehicle was told, it was from the car companies' point of view, and filled with bad information, even from very good media outlets. It shocked me. We only knew this because we were personally involved as EV1 drivers. We realized that this story was not going to get told unless we told it.”
One dramatic moment in the film takes place at a funeral for the electric car staged by some of its disappointed celebrity advocates still smarting from the loss. Ed Begley Jr. addresses the mourners. “What the detractors and the critics of electric vehicles have been saying for years is true. Given the limited range, it can only meet the needs of 90% of the population.”
In unraveling the story, the film borrows its metaphor from Agatha Christie's classic Murder on the Orient Express in which all the suspects turn out to have had a hand in the killing as they passed around the knife and each took their stab at the body. The murder of the electric car was a complex synthesis of politics, economics and corporate power in which the usual suspects—the automotive industry and the oil companies—were joined by lobbyists, governmental bodies and even CARB itself to plunge in the blade. Reminiscent in some ways of GM buying up the L.A. trolleys and junking them in order to ensure that single-owner vehicles would be the only real transportation option, there is still plenty of blame to go around.
All good detectives start with motive, so let's take a look at why the vested interests would not want a car without exhaust fumes that, once the technological challenges were worked with and met, would undoubtedly be a hugely-desirable item for consumers. In the case of the oil companies, it is not difficult to see why a car that would eliminate stops at the gas pump would cause alarm. But for the auto companies, the car's very efficiency represented another kind of threat. The EV1 was a VERY low maintenance vehicle. The average maintenance check involved rotating the tires and refilling the windshield wiper fluid. Imagine the effect of that on the maintenance departments of dealerships and the tremendous financial repercussions that would have on the whole auto supply industry. One telling scene in the film involves EV mechanic Bob Sexton standing at a table with all the parts of a standard car engine that the electric version just doesn't have. Think motor oil, filters, spark plugs. And the billion-dollar plus brake industry too had reason to fear: The regenerative braking system in the EV1, in which the car's electronic controls handle much of the work of slowing down the car and use the kinetic energy to help keep the batteries charged, spares the mechanical brake system from much of the wear-and-tear we are used to in gas-powered vehicles.
General Motors, by the way, is not the only car company with its fingerprints on the knife, though its announcement in January, 2000, that there was “no further need” to produce the electric car followed by barely a month the finalizing of its plans to purchase the Hummer brand name. Ford, Honda, Nissan, Chrysler and Toyota all had electric cars in production in response to the California Zero-Emission Standards and all ended up crushing at least part of their fleets. Toyota actually sold a very effective model, the RAV4EV, which many drivers who couldn't lease the EV1 bought before they were also pulled from the market. Despite problems that arise from the relative lack of infrastructure to support them (though COSTCO, interestingly, has electric recharging available at many of its conventional fuel outlets in Southern California), they are still happily driving them to this day.
This bond that forms between the electric vehicle owners and their cars might also explain the passion it has inspired in its defense. Dramatic scenes in the film revolve around the actions taken by some activists in Burbank to prevent GM from carting the EV1s off to the Arizona junking site. On March 14, 2005, Baywatch actress Alexandra Paul parked her electric Toyota in the path of a fleet of trucks hauling a large consignment of the vehicles as supporters with signs and megaphones decried the company's abandonment of their clean technology. The organization that was created to oppose that organized destruction,' Don't Crush.com , later morphed into Plug In America , co-founded by a former GM employee, Chelsea Sexton, whose heart-and-soul commitment to the cars she'd been promoting as part of the pilot program didn't end when the program was axed.
But what about CARB itself, the California Air Resources Board, whose visionary 1990 mandate began the pressure on the auto companies, GM in particular, to take seriously the promise that its initial unveiling of the Impact revealed? Waves of assault from the auto industry over the years since that bold first step resulted first in watering-down the standards, then in the ultimate removal of electric cars from the state's requirements.
The process went something like this. In March, 1995, the American Automobile Manufacturer's Association (AAMA), a powerful industry lobbying organization, circulated a confidential memo advocating a public relations “grassroots education campaign” to repeal the CARB Zero-Emissions Vehicle provisions. Among other things, pressure was brought to bear on CARB that included doomsday scenarios about the automobile industry being unable to sell cars in California if those provisions, and fuel-efficiency standards tied to them, were kept in place. (The president and CEO of the AAMA at that time was none other than Andrew Card, until recently the chief of staff in the Bush White House . ) In 1996, CARB announced that a compromise had been reached with seven of the largest automakers rescinding the 1998 target of 2% ZEVs on California highways and substituting a language that stated that the industry would “promote and market ZEVs” and build them “in a production capacity sufficient to meet market demand in California.”
It is in this light that some of the film's other charges against GM make sense: that it made leasing the cars difficult for consumers who wanted them and deliberately undersold the EV1 by failing to promote it in a manner that would really let consumers know what was available to them. To the first point, there is evidence that many people who requested information on the leases were never contacted, or, as the program wore on, were subjected to long waiting lists that few could surmount except for celebrities who had it within their power to embarrass the company publicly. As to creating market demand—something everyone would concede the auto companies know how to do fairly well!—an industry ad for the EV1 gives a fascinating glimpse of how it was promoted. Instead of the usual glamour shots of beautiful cars airlifted to the tops of buttes in Montana or speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway on a gorgeous green-gold California afternoon, promos for the EV1 unaccountably featured creepy music and black-and-white close-ups of shadowy silhouettes on pavement that look like they come from a 50s' Civil Defense PSA. Hardly a big incentive to demand—but if one's promise is'“to produce the cars in a capacity sufficient to meet market demand,” maybe not so hard to understand after all.
(A clip from this ad campaign, and from the film itself, are viewable in the context of an interview with Chris Paine on PBS'' NOW by series host David Brancaccio at http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/index.html )
First, the 1998 2% figure was scratched; but California still required that 10% ZEVs be on the roads by 2003. But as the 2003 deadline loomed, a new initiative came from the car companies in the form of a lawsuit brought by GM, Daimler-Chrysler and seven San Joaquin auto dealerships in January 2002 to block implementation of the ZEV guidelines. They were supported before the end of the year by a “friend of the court” brief filed by the U.S. Justice Department claiming that states did not have the right to set fuel economy standards as this should be reserved for the federal government.
The pressure being applied had its intended effect; over the course of the next year, CARB reversed its original requirement and began to shift its focus to hybrids and lower-emission vehicles. The only technology with no exhaust that it now supported involved hydrogen fuel cells. In place of the provision that would have seen between 100,000 and 200,000 Zero-Emission Vehicles on the road by 2003 came a stipulation calling for 250 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2008. Hopes that some number of electric cars would continue to remain in the state's guidelines in order to foster and maintain their official status were dashed. No mention was made of the EV1 or any of its kin.
Many in the environmental movement place the lion's share of the responsibility for these decisions on the shoulders of CARB chief Dr Alan C. Lloyd. Four months before the CARB meeting that eliminated the electric car, Lloyd was appointed chairman of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a group of automakers and public agencies that promotes the development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and infrastructure.
A figure of some complexity, Lloyd has also earned points with activists for adding his voice to an ultimately successful effort last year by dontcrush.com to save the Toyota RAV4EV when he supported their efforts to revive the car by sending a letter to the company's U.S. headquarters calling on the Japanese automaker to allow leaseholders and others to purchase existing models. But it is clear where his primary allegiance lies.
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles, unlike electric cars an unproven technology, make the Oil industry, for one, much less uncomfortable. Like gasoline, they are a fill-up technology rather than a plug-in technology—and even proponents of the system admit that a practical hydrogen car is several years away.
The future, however, still holds promise. To Chris Paine, a major goal of his film is to let people know that electric cars were a real option. The final scenes of Who Killed the Electric Car? are not bitter; they are hopeful in their focus on how much was learned in the past decade-and-a-half that is fueling, quite literally, new and improved ZEVs or their close relatives. Improvements in the Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries that powered the EV1 are increasing the vehicles' range; work on a new generation of cars using Lithium-Ion (Li-on) batteries is progressing. Plug-in hybrids are in the wings that will decrease dependence on the gas-engine of those models. Despite the demise of the EV1, it may well prove to be a catalyst in our conversion to a cleaner and cheaper way of powering our lives.
For more on the future of electric cars, see the interview with Chelsea Sexton of PlugInAmerica.com. The film's website www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/ electric.html is full of useful links and information.
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