April’s Green Screen: Who Killed the Electric Car?

This April, check out Who Killed the Electric Car?

Ever dreamed or even thought about driving a vehicle that doesn’t tax the environment the way our current vehicles do? Ever wished you could just power your car by plugging it into your home like a hairdryer or a blender? Ever wanted to say good riddance to pumping gas? Well once upon a time, it was all possible…for a heartbeat.

In Who Killed The Electric Car? writer and director Chris Pane explores the many births and short lived lives of the electric car. Martin Sheen narrates this thorough investigation of the car itself, its friends, its enemies and its future.

You’d be amazed to find out in the first minutes of this film that the electric car was invented way back when cars began. They were quiet and practical but couldn’t hold a candle to the flashy gas powered cars that became synonymous with the fifties. Over the years, car manufacturers dabbled in electric car technology but nothing really came to fruition. It wasn’t until 1990, when California created the Zero Vehicle Emissions Mandate requiring 10% of vehicles to be emission free by 2004 that a company finally emerged with the technology. That company was GM and their answer was the EV1.

The EV1 was quiet, cool, sexy, fast and affordable. It was a practical electric car being sold to the public and those who knew about it loved it. Demands were high but rather confusingly, production was low. Just as quickly as the car was unveiled to the world, it was taken back, hidden away and eventually crushed and literally shredded like you would a dirty paper trail.

What happened and who was responsible for its demise? In the words of one EV1 owner – why was “a company so cannibalistic about its own product”? Who Killed The Electric Car? offers many convincing explanations: poor advertising, law suits from the automotive industry that destroyed the ZEV mandate, a shift towards hydrogen power, misrepresentation from oil companies, a lack of true understanding of the situation on the part of the public and the list goes on.

Who Killed The Electric Car? is a fascinating dissection of a genuine travesty in modern technology – one that continues to this day – check out a recent Los Angeles Times article pertaining to emission standards today: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-zev28mar28,1,7499783.story
But there is hope – the last chapter of the film looks towards a brighter future, to hybrid vehicles, some that include a plug in to your home that will run on electricity created from solar and wind power. The bottom line is we’re getting closer to oil independence despite these enormous set backs but it’s up to us, the public, the consumers to lean on the manufacturers and the politicians and ask for more.