The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

I Want an Electric Car Nowwww!

April 6th, 2007

(to be whined in a Veruca Salt-esque voice)

We just recently watched the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, now available on DVD. I’d seen a trailer for the film when I saw An Inconvenient Truth in the theater, and the pairing certainly makes sense, as the main impetus behind the short-lived electric car was environmental.

Never having lived in California, I knew little about the ebbs and flows of that state’s emissions laws. Basically, the film argues, car companies created cars such as GM’s EV1 to comply with the state’s new mid-1990s laws, while at the same time these companies were also working behind the scenes to get the laws repealed. Thus, they had little incentive to aggressively promote their new electric cars.

The film also lays partial blame at the feet of consumers, oil corporations, and politicians. But the car companies seem to have acted the most sneakily, so their sins seem the more egregious. Because GM only ever leased (rather than sold) their EV1s to customers, when they wanted to shift attention to repealing California’s emissions laws, they began going around and collecting the EV1s back from the people who had been happily driving them. The EV1s were then sent off to junkyards to be crushed.

The documentary does a good job of making you feel emotional about these poor little cars and indignant about their waste. True, it may have been a little over the top when EV1 supporters staged a funeral for the murdered electric car, but you start to understand their feelings of betrayal.

Celebrity former EV1 leasers include Tom Hanks. And Mel Gibson, which would probably make a lot of people want to avoid the EV1 if it were around today. He hadn’t yet descended to the lows of last summer when the film was made, but he was already in his bearded madman stage, which does not inspire confidence.

Nevertheless, I now want an electric car. They require very little maintenance, and, according to a mechanic who used to service EV1s, they don’t get your hands dirty. I admit that may be the main appeal for me. Aside from my ever-present environmental guilt, anyway.

Unfortunately, the only electric cars around now are very expensive, because development efforts have largely been diverted to the hydrogen fuel cell, which, according to Who Killed the Electric Car?, is years away from being a remotely practical technology. There is a new little roadster put out by a company called Tesla Motors. (Yup, Tesla, like Nikola Tesla in The Prestige—and in real life. By the way, I just discovered that David Bowie played Tesla in The Prestige. I would never have recognized him! Of course, the last thing I saw him in was Labyrinth, in which he had spiky hair and lots of eyeliner and danced around with Muppets. Anyway.)

But the Tesla electric car is $200,000 or something equally ridiculous. Ah well. One day I hope they make affordable ones for us common people.

Entry Filed under: Movies, Uncategorized