The Movie
Who Killed the Electric Car? wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times when the film was released in 2006, is "a murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage." If that was true two years ago, it is even more rage-inducing now that the killers - primary among them, GM, creator and destroyer of the little EV1 - are themselves fighting for their lives. Recommendation: before they lift a finger to bail out Detroit, the Obama Transition team and the current and future members of Congress should check out Chris Paine's excellent documentary from their local Blockbuster or rent it from Netflix, posthaste.
It wouldn't surprise me if most Americans outside the California test market had never heard of the EV1. Introduced in LA and other California markets in 1996, the EV1 was doomed from the start. Why? It was too good: great mileage, few spare parts, little maintenance - lots of rice bowls were threatened. Introduced as an answer to California's 1990 Zero Emission mandate, GM preferred to fight the regulations while it pointed to the Electric Vehicle as proof that it was doing something for the environment. Its advertising campaign for the EV1 has to be seen to be believed. Never was there a scarier introduction to a new product - post-apocalyptic images and sound - you'd be forgiven for staying away from an EV1 after seeing the GM ads.
Watching Who Killed the Electric Car? produced a little pang of nostalgia along with the rage. In two of the three short periods when we lived in the States, we owned Saturns, which in the 90s were truly imaginative alternatives to gas-guzzling American cars - they were American-made, but looked and handled like more expensive imports. The EV1 was marketed by Saturn, but Saturn was on the Dark Side of GM in this story.
The good guys? S. David Freeman, with his folksy tone, was Energy Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (the last President to understand and take action to reduce America's energy dependence) and Stan and Iris Ovshinsky, whose batteries powered the EV1 and many hybrids. They and a host of Electric Vehicle aficionados paint a picture of a wonderful experiment that could have - more than a decade ago - put the United States on the track of energy sustainability and being on the right side of climate change.
This, however, is what happened: EV1s, which had been leased (not sold) to customers, were recalled. The film's most poignant moments show loyal customers trying to save the sequestered cars from the shredders. I never saw a car shredder before, but picture an industrial-strength version of your standard paper shredder, then insert Electric Vehicle. Dust.
If ever there was a clearer illustration of GM's desire to erase any trace of this car, it is The Shredder shot. EV1 customers couldn't even buy the cars back, so eager was GM to disappear all evidence of their existence. Just like the auto-oil-tire industry collusion of the 40s and 50s, when Los Angeles and other American cities were hoodwinked into trashing their clean public transit trams and trolleys for pollution-spewing mass-produced Detroit buses and cars.
The Culprits
OK, so GM stinks. Is that a reason to let them wither and die? Some think so:
- "A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs." Mitt Romney, son of Detroit, in "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," November 18 2008 NYT.
- "By propping up GM and saving some jobs now, we will see many more lost just down the road." Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Nation, November 18.
Others aren't so sure. Says Spencer Abraham, former Bush Energy Secretary, in today's NYT:
If we knew then what we know now about the systemic shock to our economy, would we have allowed Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt? Absolutely not. If we let any of the Big Three go bankrupt, we will set in motion a chain of events that will cause us, in six months, to ask again: How did we let this happen?
Irwin Stelzer of the conservative Hudson Institute, writing in yesterday's Times of London, called for
a government guarantee of all warranties backing vehicles sold while GM (or Chrysler) is in bankruptcy. Throw in government guarantees of pension obligations, some retraining and other protection for older workers who might be adversely affected by rulings of the bankruptcy courts, and you have a compassionately conservative and economically efficient solution to the industry’s problems.
Here's my bottom line, and it's what the good people at "Revenge of the Electric Car" (Chris Paine's sequel to Who Killed the Electric Car? to be released in 2010) propose:
[We] urge Congress to withhold any bailout funds from the auto industry, unless and until the industry agrees to mass-produce fuel efficient automobiles - electric cars.
Congress should not, under any circumstances, release the bailout money to automobile manufacturers without making these demands. Without these demands, the automobile manufacturers will just continue with “business as usual,” manufacturing gas-guzzlers, which would increase our dependency on the Middle-East oil producing countries. This dependency must end now!
In my view, Detroit and the related American car industry is truly "too big to fail." For many of the same reasons that Wall Street institutions were propped up, Washington will probably in the end have to inject money into the Big Three car makers (it's not like this wasn't done before; see Chrysler rescue, 1979).
But, dear Congress and (future) Obama Administration: do extract meaningful reforms while you're at it. Those EV1 blueprints are somewhere in GM headquarters; what's more, as Who Killed the Electric Car? shows, the technology - especially battery performance - has greatly improved since the EV1's truncated life on earth.
Nothing would make more sense than to require immediate retooling to reactivate the Electric Vehicle production line. Poetic justice for all those drivers who experienced the EV1 and were crestfallen to have it taken away. And fresher air for the rest of us.