Miscellaneous Comments on Who Killed the Electric Car?

Who Killed the Electric Car? opened this evening. As Seed has a nice interview with the filmmaker, Chris Paine, I thought I would see it and write of a review.

(Incidentally, I saw this film tonight in a theater of a whopping 27 people in downtown Manhattan. Considering that this is Manhattan, and it is opening night I wouldn't be holding out for An Inconvenient Truth level turnout over the next couple weeks.)

(I don't have time to write a coherent essay on the film, so my issues with it are dealt with below in more or less random order.)

First, I disagree with this movie's title. I guess I really don't buy the notion that the electric car is dead. Toyota and a bunch of Japanese auto makers are making as many hybrids as they can reasonable manufacture, and many of them are starting to have plug-in attachments. Just because GM was idiotic enough not to see this market (discussed below) doesn't mean that the demand isn't going to be met by someone else. To me a fairer title for this movie would be: "Who killed the EV1?"

Second, I can't say that I was terribly impressed with this movie overall. I feel like it was doing OK in trying to deal with a complex issue without dumbing it down, but then at the end when they tried to summarize things it they suddenly dropped any attempt to be multisided. I also feel like it ignored some complexities in actors.

The film offers the following culprits with respect to who killed the electric car:

1) Consumers
2) Batteries
3) GM (the automakers)
4) Oil producers
5) Government
6) Hydrogen fuel cells
7) The California Air Resources Board (CARB)

(The filmmaker vindicates batteries from responsilibity later in the film, and I don't dispute his point. Basically, the counter-argument that the batteries weren't good enough at the time to make attractive electric vehicles I don't think holds a lot of water. But the rest of these I would like to take one at a time -- with the exception of CARB which I don't have time to write about right now.)

Consumers: This movie has two premises with respect to consumers. First, it argues that consumers weren't told enough about it. GM (for reasons discussed below) decided to stifle the project by underadvertising it. While I think that is true, I also don't know if I think it would have made much of a difference. They seem to be operating on the odd assumption that if GM had but marketed the electric vehicle harder, everyone would have rolled over and bought it. Frankly, I think GM would be very amused to hear that they have that sort of power to dictate to the American consumer.

Then later in the film they shift tack and argue that if consumers were smarter about what they wanted to drive, if they weren't so short sighted in choosing their vehicles, if they only recognized the uses of electric cars, demand would have been higher for them. While I don't entirely dispute it, I find the way this premise was presented profoundly elitist. "Damn you consumers and your idiotic ways. If you had but listened to your betters in Hollywood, we would have never had this problem."

These two premises taken together do not present a flattering picture of the American consumer. Basically this film views the consumer as too dumb to make up their mind on their own so they need big companies to advertise (with government approval) and make it up for them.

GM: While I think it was a vastly idiotic decision on GM's part to opt out of the EV1 and go with the Hummer, I do sympathize with their point of view. Look at it from GM standpoint. You have gotten your ass handed to you on the global auto sales market for the better part of two decades. You have unions that stage a four alarm protest every time they realize they are not making at least twice as much as the average American. Basically finances are looking a little bleak.

Then the some pissant regulator comes along in the State of California and says "Hey, we are not only going to tell you what kind of cars you have to make (even though GM''s business by far exceeds CA and you are not even based here), but we are also going to yell at you if you don't do what we say vigorously enough." No wonder GM was dragging its feet.

Also, although GM mortally miscalculated when they decided to go with bigger vehicles, I can see why. If you think about the American consumer from that period in time would you think that the future was in small efficient automobiles? Oil prices had just fallen and the soccer mom (with her multi-kid accomodating tank) was the new target market.

Realizing this context explains why GM made the very puzzling decision not only to drag its feet on the EV1 but also to destroy all the vehicles when they got out of it. Not only was it a project you had forced down your throat, but you see it as a mortal danger to what you percieve as the wave of the future.

Were they wrong? Yeah. Do I kind of understand why? Yeah.

Oil companies: I am wililng to believe that oil companies have tried to stifle alternatives to oil, but I don't entirely believe that they have effectively stifled them. They give an example of a guy whose company develops an newer better battery only to have his company bought by Chevron-Texaco. Well even if Chevron-Texaco was successful in silencing this guy -- we find later on that they really weren't -- human innovation cannot be successfully monopolized. If the oil companies want to try and buy out every battery maker on the market, then they had better get ready to do a lot of buying. Producers of any needed technology are of unlimited supply, and I don't buy the idea that they were or will be effective at silencing them.

Government: You have no contest from me that government and the Bush administration have not been particularly helpful weaning us off of oil. However, I think it is oversimplification in the extreme to limit this to recent administrations. The American love affair with oil has a more than one hundred year history. Like all things that are percieved to be critical to national security, presidents do whatever is in their power to protect it.

And I totally love the Carter Secretary of Energy trying to put responsibility for this on later administrations. Ever hear of something called the Carter Doctrine? The Carter Doctrine pledged the United States to use military force to protect access to the Persian Gulf to make sure that the Soviets wouldn't get control over it. If you want to talk about military entanglement in the Middle East, Carter was at the very forefront.

Hydrogen: Hydrogen fuel cells are like nuclear fusion. No one disputes that they are the best deal in the long run, but the technology is just not there right now. That being the case, however, I don't think it is totally fair to blame people for being bullish on their prospects. This movie tends to portray hydrogen fuel cells like they are some sort of con perpetrated on the public, but hydrogen fuel cells are in reality a good idea even if that reality is unrealized.

Take home: This movie was doing a great job talking about the complexity of this issue right until the end when it started trying to summarize and place blame. There is plenty of blame in this case to go around, and I really feel like it is a case of retrospective lynching to place it too harshly on any one group.