Pulling the Plug On the Green Machine

Hamilton Spectator/Canada
Jun 06, 2006

A decade ago, Chris Paine was just a guy who loved his electric car. He and about 800 other Californians leased battery-powered cars from General Motors, Ford, Toyota and a handful of other companies in the full expectation that this was the future.

The car companies, spurred on by tough California anti-pollution laws, had been working on alternatives to the internal combustion engine since about 1990 and several environmentally conscious cities had installed recharging stations at supermarkets and in car parks.

But then as a new millennium came and U.S. dependence on foreign oil became a hot political issue, something weird happened. The car companies who'd leased out electric cars began demanding them back. And they wouldn't take no for an answer.

Paine, an internet entrepreneur who had dabbled in film-making, knew something was up when he took his General Motors EV1 to a dealership for a routine tire rotation in 2003.

When he called to see if his car was ready, he was told he would never see it again. "But there are two months left on the lease," he objected.

The dealership told him the car had left the premises. When Paine asked where it was, they said, "We can't tell you." He then said, "What about all the stuff in my car? My gym bag?"

They said they'd try to find his things. He asked if he couldn't simply pick them up himself. No, they said.

"I'd had an idea of making a film to show how cool the electric car was, especially since it was only available in California," Paine says.

"Suddenly I realized -- this story is way bigger than that." Three years later he's finished his film, a startling documentary entitled Who Killed the Electric Car? In interviews with key players -- designers, engineers, marketers, politicians, industry regulators and consumer advocates -- it makes a powerful case that California's experiment with EVs was deliberately sabotaged by a coalition of oil and car companies, along with their political allies, for short-term profit.

In the official version by General Motors and largely echoed in California newspapers and TV broadcasts, the electric car simply couldn't attract enough customers. The battery didn't give the car sufficient range for most people and took too long to recharge.

The potential drain on the electricity supply was also a problem at a time when the grid was severely overtaxed and, in 2001-2002, subject to shortages and blackouts.

Both industry and environmental groups raised concerns about what they called the "long tailpipe" problem -- the argument that, while the cars didn't produce emissions, coal-fired power stations and other electricity-generating plants did, making the whole exercise counterproductive.

Paine's film, due for release at the end of June, expertly blows each of these assumptions out of the water.

While it's true the first EV batteries only lasted 35-50 kilometres, a second generation of nickel-metal hydride batteries came along in 1998 that could have boosted it to 160-190 km. Now, new lithium-ion batteries promise a range of up to 480 km.

The "long tailpipe" theory was contradicted by a U.S. department of energy study in 2001 showing a switch to electric vehicles would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 35 per cent.

A 2004 study based on official California data suggested that the net reduction could be as high as 67 per cent.

The drain on the electricity grid, Paine argues, would be minimal since most people would charge cars overnight, when supply is plentiful and prices are cheaper.

"The utility grid in the United States could charge 30-40 million cars every night," he says. "We're talking about energy that's just available and not being used."

The demand issue is perhaps the most intriguing. It is true that only about 800 electric vehicles were leased between 1996, when they first came on the market, and 2003, when they were unceremoniously yanked off again.

But a lot of that had to do with the near-total absence of advertising. As Dave Freeman, a power-grid administrator, says in the film: "We never saw a TV ad with an electric car scampering up a hill with a good-looking man or woman draped around it. That's the way they sell cars."

A former GM employee and EV activist called Chelsea Sexton unearthed evidence that GM, contrary to its rhetoric about lack of demand, was sitting on a waiting-list of 4,000 interested customers. GM responded that really only about 50 of those 4,000 people were genuinely interested.

After watching the film, though, it is impossible to separate GM's response from the political context of the time. From 1990 on, car companies were bristling at the California Air Resources Board's stringent rule -- motivated by smog alerts and fears for public health -- that 10 per cent of vehicles on the state's roads needed to be emission-free by the year 2003.

A major lobbying effort against the regulation was mounted. By 1996, the auto industry had talked the board into modifying its requirement so that the pace of production of zero-emission vehicles would be linked to demand.

In other words, car-makers and oil companies worried about the implications of EVs on their traditional revenue sources were handed a get-out clause.

If they could show consumers weren't interested in the cars, they might not have to produce them.

And so it came to pass. Corporate interest in electric-car production dwindled to nothing. As John Wallace, formerly with Ford's electric-vehicle program, says in the film: "We began to get the eerie feeling that we were going over a cliff."

In April 2003, a watershed ruling by the California Air Resources Board let the car companies off the hook. They were still required to think about lowering emissions, but were given a new deadline of 2008 and a more flexible range of options, from petrol-electric hybrids to fuel-cell vehicles.

Immediately, GM and the other companies started pulling electric vehicles off the roads. They could do this because the cars had been leased rather than sold, and the leases were almost all set to expire within a year or two.

By July 2003, the EV drivers decided to stage a public protest.

Designers, drivers, sympathetic politicians and others turned out in large numbers to a mock-funeral held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. An electric car was ceremonially draped in black crepe. Paul MacCready, a celebrated designer of aircraft and car engines who played a key role in the development of GM's EV1, laid a wreath.

The story, meanwhile, got weirder. In December 2004, Paine got a tip-off that GM was crushing the reclaimed EV1s at a facility in Arizona -- obliterating evidence of the vehicles' very existence.

Without even waiting for financial backing, he made an impulsive decision to rent a film crew and a helicopter and made an aerial reconnaissance of the facility where, sure enough, he saw the EV1s being flattened and loaded on to trucks for shredding.

Three months later, activists discovered that 78 EV1s were in storage at a GM facility in the LA suburb of Burbank. They staged a month-long vigil for the vehicles' survival. To challenge the company's line that nobody wanted them, they found buyers for every last one and offered a total of $1.9 million.

The vehicles, however, ended up loaded on to trucks and removed, and several activists who tried to intervene ended up under arrest.

The passion of the electric-car enthusiasts does come across as a touch eccentric in the film. But the weirdness of the car companies' systematic destruction of their own fleets is even more striking.

As Peter Horner comments in the film: "There is no precedent for a car company rounding up every one of a particular kind of car and crushing them as if one of them might get away."

The film doesn't offer an easy answer to the question posed by its title, but rather considers a whole gallery of suspects -- everyone from government and industry to consumers themselves. At a time when oil prices are soaring beyond $70 a barrel, the question could not be more timely.

Paine argues: "If this car hadn't been dismantled by the oil companies, the car companies and the federal government, we would be up to about a million electrics on the road right now ... Instead, we are in a crisis situation with no immediate options."

The alternative-fuel technology pushed hardest by the Bush administration has been hydrogen -- something that is still years, if not decades, away from becoming a practical solution on a mass scale.

Paine's film argues powerfully that hydrogen is in fact highly impractical and is being touted largely because it offers a key role to energy and fuel distribution companies.

Hybrid cars get a more sympathetic review, but are seen as a compromise. A new generation of "plug-in" hybrids are perhaps the closest thing to a revival of the dream of electric vehicles -- they'd have much larger batteries than current hybrids, so drivers could travel the first 50-60 km entirely gasoline-free.

Paine himself drives a hybrid and has held on to a Toyota electric vehicle. Toyota sold its electric RAV4 briefly and activists snapped up all 300 on offer.

It makes no noise and travels easily at 70 miles per hour.

Naturally, Paine has a vanity plate. It reads: EV RIDER.