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Bonus Review #14
Film: Who Killed the Electric Car? [NR] 91 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $12.00
Where Viewed: Landmark Egyptian Theatre, Seattle, WA
[Seattle International Film Festival]
When 1st Seen: 9 June 2006
Time: 7:00 p.m.
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DVD |
Click for 'Review Lite' [a 150-word review of this film]
A fitting companion film to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, is this new documentary written and directed by Chris Paine, entitled, Who Killed the Electric Car?. It will strike the vast majority of the people who hear of this film let alone see it that the title makes no sense. You cannot kill something, after all, that never existed in the first place. Most USAers never knew that there already was a successful implementation of a viable electric car, loved by legions, and releasing zero emissions, in California in the late 1990s, and Chris Paine would probably say that's exactly the way the US government, the automobile industry, the oil industry, and the California Air Responsibility Board wants it. While General Motors spent billions developing, advertising and LEASING—not selling—its EV-1 electric car that could go 90 miles on a charge, charge at home for the equivalent of 60-cents a gallon, accelerate rapidly like a sports car, and meet the needs of 90% of the consumers, it very quietly took every single car back at the end of their leases and destroyed them. Huh? Can you imagine that happening in any other industry? Meanwhile, despite waiting lists of 100s of people, they claimed there was no demand for the car, closed the manufacturing plant, and discontinued any research into that line of vehicle.
Well, watching this film was all a little too surreal for me. There is even an appearance by Mel Gibson, an owner of an EV-1, with his scraggly beard, looking nearly like a mad man or, at least, like he'd been alone on a deserted island for a decade, describing the car and channeling his Jerry Fletcher character from the film Conspiracy Theory. How could this happen and why? Well, one thing that Chris Paine does extremely well is analyze all of the possible reasons, debate them, and draw some conclusions by the end of the film. I'd like to encourage you to see the film, so I won't summarize his efforts here. All I will say is that the reasons ultimately will probably make you quite angry even if you are not an environmentalist, even if you love your gas-guzzling SUV, and even if you don't care one bit about the level of control that petroleum imports and exports have on the world. It should make you mad, because there is simply no logic to it. Meanwhile, we in the USA have a president preaching constantly about our addiction to oil, the electric car would have done something about this, and he was the person who led the charge along with the auto industry to sue California over its laws to force car manufacturers to sell an increasingly large percentage of zero-emission cars. Again, it was almost just too surreal especially on the tail end of just having seen An Inconvenient Truth as the two issues are intimately entangled. In any case, Who Killed the Electric Car? May seem a far less balanced approach to the issues it seeks to address, however, they become largely irrelevant when one stops to consider the pure logic of capitalism. If you have buyers and a seller, and the seller profits from the sale and the buyer is thrilled not to have to figure out how to build the thing himself, then you have a good and profitable match. There is no logical reason why a company would spend a ton of money to bring a product to market, lease it, and then take it back and destroy it. At least, the company would let the consumers who wanted to do so, buy out the lease and keep the product. Certainly, it made no sense to take it back and destroy it.
This is a very well-made and passionate documentary that should open a lot of people's eyes to one of the least well-kept conspiracies theories in American history.
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1 comment:
Watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" recently (great documentary), then i heard that GM and Tesla are making another run at the electric car (yay for progress!) hopefully development of this technology can go on unhindered by the corporations that depend on oil consumption.
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