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PULLING THE PLUG -- Who Killed the Electric Car? |
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Written by asap
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Saturday, 15 July 2006 |
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 NEW YORK — Chelsea Sexton was 17 years old when she started working for General Motors -- a dealer was so impressed with her love of her new Saturn that he offered her a job selling them.
Three years later, in 1996, the Los Angeles native was hired to help the company sell its brand-new EV1, a zippy all-electric vehicle that drivers plugged in instead of filling with gas.
It earned a fast and intense following among green-minded motorists who leased the cars. Ford and Toyota came out with their own electric cars, and for a while it looked like they could signal the end of the oil-consuming, pollution-spewing internal combustion engine.
Of course, look out the window of your non-electric car today and you’ll see plenty of gas guzzlers on the road ahead. What you won’t see are EV1s, which have gone the way of Sexton’s GM job. In 2001, after eight years with the company, she was among those laid off when the company ended its electric car program.
The contentious end of the vehicles is the focus of the new documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which lays the blame on everyone from automakers to oil companies to California regulators.
“We knew years before we were laid off they weren’t going to continue the program,” says Sexton, who met her husband, car technician Bob Sexton, when both were working on the EV1 campaign. “We figured either we can quit or we can stay on the inside and try to change it, and that’s what we did.”
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 MURDER OR SUICIDE?
The film details what Sexton saw as an internal struggle within GM: While some tried to promote the car, others tried to kill it.
Several automakers produced electric vehicles in response to California’s 1990 air quality regulations requiring that 10 percent of all new cars marketed in the state by 2003 produce no tailpipe emissions.
After persuading judges to whittle away the regulations, automakers began reclaiming and destroying the vehicles, saying there wasn’t demand to make them viable in the mass market.
The film suggests that GM produced the cars in an empty attempt to meet the regulations, but underpromoted them so it could make its case that motorists weren’t interested.
It wields its heavy accusations with a light touch, including goofy interviews with EV1 drivers like Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson and showing scenes from a tongue-in-cheek funeral for electric cars organized in July 2003 by the film’s writer and director, Chris Paine.
GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss, who appears in the film to defend the world’s largest automaker, says there was nothing conspiratorial about GM’s shutdown of its program. The company spent $1 billion on electric cars, but they simply didn’t catch on, he said.
“I think what the movie illustrates very well is the enthusiasm, passion, and loyalty of people who leased the vehicles,” he told asap. “We just wished there were a heck of a lot more of them.”
Noting the need to plug in the cars every 100 miles, the four to eight hours required to recharge them and the difficulty of finding charging stations on the road, he said the cars “simply forced too many tradeoffs on a person’s lifestyle.”
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DEMAND AND SUPPLY
The summer’s other major green-minded documentary, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” tells a literally global story about greenhouse gases. “Who Killed the Electric Car?” focuses on the small but intense debates between GM and the devoted fans of its electric cars.
Sexton and Barthmuss are still happy to debate specifics, including the truth about a roughly 5,000-person waiting list that Sexton and other advocates compiled to try to convince GM there was a market for the cars.
Barthmuss says the company called people on the list to gauge their interest, and when they learned about the vehicle’s limitations, the number of potential buyers fell to 50. Sexton says she knows people on the list who weren’t called, and that it would be absurd for a company trying to sell cars to tell potential customers about the vehicles’ drawbacks.
Electric car technology lives on, Barthmuss says, in hybrid vehicles that combine gas and electricity. Automakers are also using it to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles.
Even ardent hydrogen backers admit it will be years before hydrogen vehicles are mass-produced. But the company is also interested in hybrids that can be plugged in for even less reliance on oil, Barthmuss said.
As for when they might hit the market, he’ll say only, “Stay tuned.”
Now 30 years old and a member of Plug in America, a group that promotes plug-in hybrids, Sexton hopes the film will encourage consumers to demand more of automakers. She also wants it to help persuade government regulators to reintroduce the kinds of strict standards California established in 1990.
With oil prices high, the president calling on Americans to reduce their dependence on foreign oil, and two environmental-minded documentaries in theaters, she believes today’s green vehicles won’t be dismissed as ahead of their time.
“The whole potential of all this is palpable,” she said. “You can almost feel the energy.”
On the Net:
http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com
http://www.gm.com/
http://pluginamerica.com/
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asap contributor Tim Molloy works on the AP’s national editing desk in New York.
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