Who killed the electric car?

July 5, 2006

Arianna Huffington had a great item today on the other fascinating documentary of the year that deals with the environment, politics, and public policy. It’s called “[tag]Who Killed the Electric Car[/tag]?”

Who Killed the Electric Car? starts out as an informative history of the energy-efficient vehicles. We learn that their development was jumpstarted by the state of California, which, in 1990, choking on blankets of smog, passed regulations designed to force car companies to start producing emission-free vehicles (indeed, two percent of new cars needed to be exhaustless by 1998). Since a number of companies, including GM, were already working on electric-car prototypes, business and environmental concerns seemed in sync.

In 1996, GM introduced the [tag]EV1[/tag], which you could juice up by plugging it into a wall socket. The cars quickly developed a small but passionate following (small because GM produced less than a thousand of them; passionate because they were terrific — and terrifically efficient — cars).

But behind the scenes, numerous forces were hard at work fighting to undermine the California zero-emission mandate — and the success of the EV1.

At this point, the film shifts gears from electric-car primer to a compelling murder [tag]mystery[/tag], as the filmmakers roll out the prime suspects (and, yes, many of them are of the “usual” variety) in an effort to determine who, indeed, killed the [tag]electric car[/tag]. It’s like a cinematic game of Clue.

PBS’s NOW did a terrific segment on the film, and the questions it raises, about a month ago. It was absolutely fascinating.

Best of all, as documentaries about no-longer-available cars with technological breakthroughs go, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” is pretty timely, dealing with gas prices, technology, oil dependency, and the environment. If this sounds dry, it isn’t — the movie’s story is a mystery/whodunit.

Keep an eye out for this one. It opened last week in LA and NYC, but with any luck, it’ll be in your town soon. The movie’s site (with trailer) is here, and the PBS clip is here. Take a look.

I’m definitely waiting to go see it. The preview before “An Inconvenient Truth” had me hooked. Ed Begley, Jr. has a great line (paraphrasing): “This car isn’t for everyone. It’ll only serve the needs of 90% of the public.” It definitely looks like an exciting murder mystery.

It’s especially timely now that hybrids are the hottest cars around. A year ago, I was suprised to see a Prius or another Civic (we own one) on the street. Now I see several dozen in my area. It’s clear the public want energy efficient vehicles.

  • Anyone have any idea why the Japanese don’t have a viable 100% electric? Did they put all their money on the hybrids?

  • The fascinating thing about electric cars it that their ‘fuel’ already has a distribution grid. As such, it would destroy the whole gasoline distribution industry (gas refineries and gas stations, not to mention the gasoline truckers) and replace it with…

    …nothing.

    On the other hand, it takes minutes to refuel a gasoline or diesal car, and hours to refuel an electric.

  • The world is not ready for an electric car. An electric car, using current techology, would use far more energy to build and to operate than a similar gas powered car.

    This is not to say that we shouldn’t be doing research on hybrids and pure electric cars. I am just saying that NO ONE would buy an electric car today if they had to pay the full costs because elecric cars don’t make sense today.

    Don’t forget that electric cars have a huge built in disadvantage. It is far more efficient to use the fossil fuel to power the engine than to create electricity which is then used to power the engine.

    It might be better in reducing green house gases since the electricity can be produced with nuclear power but it is, with current technology, a huge waste of energy.

    BTW, we should add $4 a gallon tax to gasoline and use it to reduce social security taxes. This is just an updated version of John Anderson’s idea from 1980. This would give a huge incentive to come up with more efficient hybrids and better internal combustion cars.

  • “This would give a huge incentive to come up with more efficient hybrids and better internal combustion cars.” – Neil Wilson

    So would raising our CAFE standards to those used by COMMUNIST CHINA!

  • Unfortunately, electricity comes from power plants.

    There is no net reduction of energy use that results from driving an electric car. We’d still have to build 100’s of new power plants to feed all of these electric cars. What to do. What to do.

    The electric car does not solve any real problems. It just kicks them down the road. After we’ve figured out how to generate clean power with wind or solar, we can talk about alternate car(s) models. I’d vote for hydrogen as a base transport fuel, created locally (with electricity of course).

    Batteries are heavy, costly, not too efficient and super toxic. From an engineering standpoint, they just suck. If you take a unit of energy and feed it to a battery, then feed it to an engine, it is by definition less efficient than just feeding that same amount of energy directly into the engine. And then there is the energy used in the vehicle to haul the batteries themselves; they are much heavier than gas or hydrogen. Electric cars are not more efficient, they just look that way.

    Sorry. And I’m as green as the come.

  • CAFE standards don’t really do ANYTHING to save gas.

    If I buy a car that gets 10 MPG and another that gets 50 MPG then the CAFE average is 30 MPG. Seems like I am getting better economy than the CAFE average.

    However, this says nothing about how much gas I am using. Maybe I use the big sports car all the time. Maybe I use the small econobox all the time.

    So, if gas is EXPENSIVE then I am more likely to use the more efficient car. If gas is cheap then why not use the expensive sports car?

    So, my point is that CAFE is not an efficient way to save gas.

  • “So, my point is that CAFE is not an efficient way to save gas.” – neil wilson

    True, overall minimums for all classes of vehicle are also necessary. But taxing gas higher is just going to encourage blackmarketing. Fixing gas milage and emmissions at the manufacturer is a lot easier governmentally.

    “Unfortunately, electricity comes from power plants.” – BT

    True, but power plant emmissions are a lot more controllable than automobile emmissions. You can pump the carbon dioxide from a power plant into the ground. You can’t do that with a car.

    Every heard the story of the car owner who takes his car into the shop to be adjusted so it passes emmissions inspection, than takes it back to the shop to increase the engine power and thereby emites illegally high pollution?

    “you take a unit of energy and feed it to a battery, then feed it to an engine, it is by definition less efficient than just feeding that same amount of energy directly into the engine.” – BT

    True, but gasoline has to be cooked out of petrolium, and that takes up some of its energy too. I can’t speak much about power plant fuels, but are they as complex to create as gasoline?

  • I’ll agree that CAFE standards are inefficient, but not useless. They do help save gas. Minimums for classes would be a better requirement.

    BT makes an excellent point that that electricity comes from somewhere and we have to consider that, but something else one can keep in mind is that the composition of the current automobile fuel structure is almost entirely oil/gas. All other fuel sources are fairly negligible, although ethanol is becoming a larger component. But the composition of the power grid is far different. Large portions of it are renewable, nuclear and hydropower, as well as the dirty old fossil fuels, coal and oil. Switching to the power grid would be a significant step toward switching to renewable power sources.

    Whether it’s a better move than switching to other alternative fuels such as oil derived from corn, sugarcane or switchgrass, I don’t know. I suspect probably not.

    Plus, we still will not have addressed the larger cultural problem, urban sprawl, that contributes largely to gas prices and pollution as well as a number of other social problems. Indeed, urban sprawl is discussed very rarely. Shouldn’t we discuss it? (Not in this thread of course, for fear of hijacking CB’s topic.)

  • I’ve been seeing 2×6 inch stickers around town that say “Who killed the electric car? Gas prices $3…$4…$5…” . Could be a promo for the movie, but no web URL on the sticker.

  • Electric Cars are Alive and Well at ZAP http://www.zapworld.com ZP (NYSE). A California based company, who has been importing, retrofitting and distributing the Smart car for the last year, is the only car company who is selling a Chinese manufactured car in the US the 100% electric Xebra city car. It can reach speeds of up to 40 mph, has a range of up to 40 miles and takes 6-8 hours to fully recharge. And charges with your standard 110V outlet.

  • Watched “Who Killed the Electric Car” recently (great documentary), then i heard that GM and Tesla are making another run at the electric car (yay for progress!) hopefully development of this technology can continue forward uninterrupted by the powers that depend on oil consumption.

    • Comments are closed.