Who Killed the Electric Car?
Hollywood discovers yet another conspiracy.
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
The song of the “Stonecutters” from an episode of The
Simpsons reminds us that electric cars and conspiracy theories
go together in the popular imagination like CO2 emissions and
global warming. Chris Paine’s documentary, Who Killed the
Electric Car? rather disarmingly plays up to the stereotype by
treating the demise of this particular electric car, GM’s EV1, as a
murder mystery. For the film makes it clear that we are dealing
with a murder rather than a natural death. Beginning with a mock
funeral for the car in a Hollywood cemetery with environmentally-
conscious movie stars delivering the eulogies, Mr. Paine ticks off
the suspects. The only one to be completely exonerated is the car
itself, or at least its battery, which was initially somewhat
inadequate.
Blame is shared among a number of other suspects, including
consumers, car companies, oil companies and the state of
California’s Air Resources Board (CARB), which mandated the
construction of electric cars in the first place in 1990 only to
rescind its own mandate in 2003. But the car companies, especially
GM, come in for the biggest share of blame. The film makes much of
GM’s deviousness in leasing rather than selling the EV1 so that,
when the CARB and its director, Alan C. Lloyd, lifted the state
mandate, it could make sure they were all taken off the road and,
literally, shredded. So there isn’t much mystery about the who. GM
killed its own product. What makes for the mystery in the eyes of
Chris Paine and such stellar advocates of the EV1 as Tom Hanks, Mel
Gibson, Peter Horton and Ed Begley Jr. — not to mention that
veteran supporter of left-wing causes, Martin Sheen, who narrates
— is why GM would have wanted to destroy what they regard as such
a terrific product.
The film offers us one explanation: parts. The electric car
didn’t have any, to speak of. A mechanic tells us that maintenance
of the EV1 left him with nothing to do but “rotate the tires and
change the washer fluid.” As a large proportion of GM’s profits —
if it had any profits — comes from parts and maintenance, you can
see how the corporation might worry. Except that it seems
counter-intuitive to suppose that success for its product could not
be in the corporation’s best interest. Can this be possible? Let’s
think of an analogy. If Coca Cola wants to get into the market for
fruit juice, it can do so without fear that selling more fruit
juice will mean that people stop drinking Coke, since there isn’t
much overlap between the two markets. But if, say, Microsoft were
to buy Apple Computer, it would do so only in order to kill it,
since the more successful it was at selling Macs the more it would
be undermining its core business.
I don’t know if the EV1 was the fantastic car that everyone in
this movie says it was. It sounds just a little too good to be true
that something so environmentally friendly could also be appealing
to consumers who, unlike these movie stars, care more about looks
or performance or economy or reliability or convenience than they
do about environmental correctness. But the better it was, the more
GM must have hated being required to be an accomplice in wrecking
the market for its main products. Was it right for the state of
California to interfere in the market in this way in the first
place? You could make an argument that, if it is in everybody’s
interest to have more people driving electric rather than
gasoline-powered cars, government at any level should legislate, as
California originally did, to make sure that more electric cars
were available to consumers.
But it’s never that simple. Such government-dictated distortions
in the market and limitations on profitability will always produce
an equal and opposite reaction from those they affect — since
governments cannot also mandate that electric cars be as profitable
as the gasoline-driven kind. With a command economy, and profit
taken out of the accounts, you could make the EV1 become for us
what the Trabant was for East Germany under communism. But
America’s free market was never going to stand that for very long.
Who Killed the Electric Car? Who else but those whose business was
most threatened by it, namely its manufacturer? But the whiff of
mystery and paranoia with which Mr. Paine’s movie artificially
surrounds the question feeds Hollywood’s appetite for conspiracy
and flatters the belief so common among the creatures of publicity
and hype that, as one of them says here: “People will buy anything
you can convince them to buy.” Insofar as that is not simply a
tautology, it is an indication that those whose business is
manipulation are likely to believe that all is
manipulation. If you believe it too, this is the movie for you.
