With Who Killed the Electric Car? liberals have
announced they may have found their antidote to talk radio — the
movie documentary.
Trying to counter Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity with Al Franken
and Janeane Garofalo obviously isn’t having much success. But after
the example of Fahrenheit 911, liberals have now hit the
screen with a barrage of documentaries — The U.S. versus John
Lennon, Al Franken: God Spoke — with lots more to
come.
The documentary is the perfect medium for the liberal message.
It’s centralized, easily manipulated, and based on visual imagery
rather than rational thought. Rush Limbaugh succeeds so well on
radio because of the clarity of his analysis, not because of what
he’s wearing or how he looks on camera. (Remember how poorly
Limbaugh did with his own TV show.) Talk radio also allows listener
feedback. The main attraction is the contribution of callers and
the give-and-take with listeners.
With the documentary, the filmmaker controls the show without
interference from the audience. Interviews can be edited and sooner
or later pretty talking heads will prevail. That’s what happens in
Who Killed the Electric Car?
The story is built around California’s attempt to mandate a
“no-emissions vehicle.” Way back in 1990, the California Air
Resources Board ruled that auto companies would have to make zero
emissions vehicles 10 percent of their fleet in order to keep
selling cars in the state. The objective — as with the recent
pledge to cut greenhouse gases 25 percent by 2020 — was to “force
technology.” The law did not specify but a zero-emissions vehicle
would obviously have to be an electric car.
Although they protested all along, GM, Ford and Toyota all
produced electric cars and got them onto the market in the late
1990s. By 2000, however, it was obvious they weren’t going to meet
the 10 percent goal. Customers weren’t buying them. Instead, the
car companies dumped them onto rental agencies, where they mostly
sat on the lot. In September 2000 the Air Resources Board reduced
the requirement to 4 percent and in July 2001 it was cut to 2
percent. By that time the electric car was widely considered a
technological disaster. The CARB eventually switched the mandate to
include gas-electric hybrids and fuel cell vehicles. With gas
prices rising, hybrids have actually been selling very well without
any state mandates.
Why did the all-electric car fail? There is one simple reason.
Although Who Killed the Electric Car? never mentions it,
recharging the battery to go only a short distance takes 20 to
40 minutes. The movie features lots of peppy shots of people
pulling up to gas stations and slipping a gas-pump-like recharger
into their vehicles. But it doesn’t show them standing around for
nearly half-an-hour waiting for the charge to finish.
And that only provides you with enough power to get home.
Putting an overnight charge on the battery so it can go 120 miles
the next day takes four to six hours. All this had no appeal to
drivers.
In 2002, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, energy correspondent for the
Economist and an enthusiast of solar power, arrived in
California researching his 2005 book, Power to the People.
When he rented a car, he found the agents ecstatic to provide him
with one of their electric cars, which were crowding the back lots.
Since he was writing a book on energy, he decided to give it a try.
Here’s what happened:
The vehicle proved to have a much shorter range than I
thought it would — closer to 50 miles than a 100. The fact that I
sped along at 80 mph in those empty HOV lanes might have drained
the battery faster, but only certain highways had that lane; more
often, I was crawling along in traffic like everyone else. And most
of the time, I was going nowhere at all, since my vehicle kept
running out of power. Charging proved the biggest nightmare. There
were plenty of chargers around, but some were of the wrong sort;
others were locked or nonfunctional. And rather than the “pretty
quick” recharge, my useless battery took more than five hours for a
full charge. As a result, my entire visit turned into a fiasco of
delayed or missed appointments, apologetic cell-phone calls, and
panicky exits from the highway to obscure malls and commuter-rail
stations in search of a charger. [Power to the People, pp.
192-193.]
In fact, when Toyota started marketing its hybrids in 2004, the
company deliberately left off any plug-in charging mechanism
because it didn’t want customers to confuse them with electric
cars. The electric car had such a bad reputation, the company
feared it would hurt sales. Instead, the battery recharges from
energy off the brakes. Even so, savvy consumers started hot-wiring
their hybrids, installing their own plug-ins so they could take
power off the grid. In its latest models, Toyota has finally
relented and installed an electric hookup.
So why would anybody make a documentary entitled Who Killed
the Electric Car? Well, the answer is obvious — it fits all
kinds of conspiracy theories about the oil and auto industry. The
movie is a hodgepodge of conflicting accusations. At one point the
oil companies are criticized for raising the price of gasoline in
recent years. Next thing you know, President Reagan is being
indicted for driving the price of oil down during the
1980s so he could get America “hooked on oil.”
To make their case, the filmmakers have managed to round up five
people who say they loved their electric cars and were devastated
when the auto companies took them off the market. Significantly,
all of these people were leasing their EV1s. None actually
bought them.
Most confusing of all is the film’s portrayal of the hydrogen
car as a lynchpin to the conspiracy. According to the filmmakers,
the auto companies were decoying everybody when they persuaded the
Air Resources Board to include hydrogen cars in the 4 percent
mandate. Yet environmentalists themselves have long been among the
biggest promoters of hydrogen cars. Amory Lovins, the soft energy
guru who helped design California’s “conservation-and-renewables”
electrical program (the one that led to the California Electrical
Shortage of 2000), is understandably missing from this documentary.
Lovins has spent the last decade promoting his “Hypercar,” a
superlight vehicle that runs on hydrogen fuel cells. In fact, most
environmentalists enthusiastically supported a “hydrogen economy”
until President George Bush endorsed it in his 2003 State of the
Union speech. Then it became part of the conspiracy.
Despite all this, we are actually fumbling toward a
low-emissions future that could play a huge role in reducing our
foreign dependence on oil. The plug-in hybrid seems to be the
vehicle of choice. It gets more than 30 miles to the gallon and
allows consumers to recharge off the electrical grid. (Of course,
that will eventually require more power plants, but that’s another
story.)
Given this more-or-less happy ending, why would anybody now make
a movie claiming the whole electric-car episode was a conspiracy?
Maybe because liberal ideology is built around such fantasies.
