Who Killed the Electric Car? exposes the scandal involving oil companies, car manufacturers and the US government in killing the EV1 - the battery-powered electric car produced by General Motors in 1996. The EV1 was clean, non-polluting, cheap and efficient, and could have contributed to saving the environment.
With the major cost, health and environmental benefits a vehicle like the EV1 could bring in mind, the Californian Air Resources Board (CARB) directed law-makers in 1996 to take the courageous step of passing a zero-emissions vehicle mandate to force car companies to produce cars with zero emissions. At first, car companies complied - producing electric utes, 4WDs and even a Humvee. However, before long, industry realised that the EV1 could actually cost more than it was worth and began to ignore the mandate.
To make car companies comply, CARB began to compromise with them and conceded that they could build zero-emission vehicles if there was a demand for them. Car makers began a campaign to prove what was in their interests - that there was no consumer demand for the EV1, even though demand was clearly there. Car makers, backed by the oil industry, began to argue that the building of recharging stations would be a waste of taxpayers' money, that the shift in energy from oil to coal would not benefit the environment and that only the rich would be able to afford to buy the EV1.
Industry also found a new partner to bully CARB into getting rid of its mandate. The Bush administration joined the lawsuit against CARB, granted subsidies to purchasers of high-polluting vehicles like the hummer and announced the Californian Fuel Cell Partnership. Bush generously donated $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money towards the development of hybrid hydrogen-fuel-cell powered vehicles. These vehicles would run on electricity and petrol "to make both environmentalists and the conservatives happy". But can we trust these "alternatives"? According to Joseph Romm, author of The Hype about Hydrogen, hydrogen-powered cars would be beyond the reach of most people and use three to four times more battery power than the EV1!
By 2002, CARB was forced to drop its mandate. At the meeting to determine the EV1's future between industry representatives and the community, Jerry Pohorsky, a consumer advocate, pointed out that CARB was "supposed to be part of the environmental protection agency - not the corporate profit protection agency". Despite the fact that out of 82 submissions to CARB, only four supported the scrapping of the mandate, CARB ignored public opinion.
At a time when global warming is becoming a critical issue (every three litres of petrol we burn adds more than 8 kilos of CO2 - a greenhouse gas - to the air), why was the EV1 destroyed? As Peter Horton asks, "How can a company be so cannibalistic over its own product?" The answer is simple: the EV1 was not going to make big bucks for business. The EV1 would mean loss of revenue to the car and oil industries. The EV1 was clean and servicing it was simple. It had no internal combustion engine, which meant that the biggest profits businesses would normally make from replacing car parts and maintaining vehicles would be lost. In addition, a clean alternative would threaten the huge profits of oil companies.
Oil companies, which are in the business of selling fuel, have no interest in seeking cleaner alternatives. Who Killed the Electric Car? also shows us that oil companies had no need to lobby the government. US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice previously held executive roles in three of the world's biggest oil companies.
Despite all the shock facts, Who Killed the Electric Car? ends on an optimistic note. The technology to produce revolutionary vehicles like the EV1 is not a dream. The technology is here now and the fight is for the future. With oil prices soaring and the environment on the verge of catastrophe, these problems are not going to go away unless we act now to change the way things are.