Who Killed The Electric Car?

Who Killed The Electric Car? [DVD] [2006]
Directed by Chris Paine

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Editorial Reviews

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

Synopsis
In the 1990s, following California's passing of the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, American car companies began producing electric cars for mainstream consumption. GM's EV1, which was by all accounts quiet, fast, and capable of driving up to 80 miles on one charge, used no gasoline and quickly developed an intensely devoted following in California. But even as its popularity grew, car manufacturers were fighting the mandate; it was overturned, and by 2005 just about every single EV1 had been recalled, crushed, and shredded. GM put its resources into the Hummer instead. WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? looks at the tangled web of interests behind the car's untimely demise, laying out convincing cases against the auto industry, big oil, corrupt federal and state governments, and consumers themselves. Chris Paine's directorial debut is not especially stylish, but it is effective. He leads viewers through the twisty maze of politics and profit that surrounds the main story, taking time to dwell on the passionate attachment that many of the cars' drivers still feel for them. Appropriately, the film is narrated by Martin Sheen--the embodiment for many Americans of socially conscious leadership, thanks to his many years on THE WEST WING--and features interviews with a motley array of celebrities from Mel Gibson to Ed Begley, Jr., but the real star of the movie is the doomed car itself and all that it stands for. The film is not especially fair or balanced; very little screen time is devoted to criticism of electric cars, and the only person on camera defending the oil companies is a singularly slimy and unappealing spokesperson from whom most viewers would be unwilling to buy a used car of any variety. But it certainly succeeds as a rousing, if occasionally depressing, call to awareness and action.

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