The documentary movie I mentioned before, Who Killed the Electric Car?, finally came out and I saw it this weekend. Not surprisingly, there is a pro-electric vehicle slant to the movie, but it still presented a quite comprehensive overview of why GM's EV1 car disappeared and really makes you think about "What could've been..."

As Ironraven mentioned in an earlier post, the first batch of EV1's had a lot of flaws, but from various EV1 fansites I have read and in the movie, GM quickly improved it. By the time the Gen II batch came out, the inadequate lead acid batteries were replaced with NiMH batteries, giving the EV1 up to 140 miles of freeway driving range, according to one EV1 driver's experience and solved the temperature sensitivity problem. With a 0-60 mph time of 8 seconds, it's no slouch, especially when it generates high torque at even low speeds, so it feels very zippy in normal driving. The EV1 was electronically limited to a top speed of 80 mph, but without the limiter, it could go 180 mph on the test track. Not bad.

No one really knows why the EV1 was killed off. The movie examines the possible motivations of various players--General Motors, the California Air Resources Board, Big Oil, battery technology, and yes, even whether the buying public was to blame. It's a tangled web. GM's motivations are particularly complicated and schizophrenic because on the one hand, as the manufacturer of the EV1, you would think that it wanted to heavily promote the EV1, but on the other hand, there was stiff pressure from the top to kill it off through lame or nonexistent advertising, laying off knowledgable sales staff, keeping supplies low, leasing only even though many owners wanted to buy, pressuring CARB to drop its requirement for a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles in California if GM could prove that there was little demand for all-electric vehicles. That's the kicker, GM tried hard to prove to CARB that there was scant demand for the electric car it was producing so that California would stop requiring that car manufacturers produce a certain percentange of zero emission vehicles.

Battery technology is one segment that was particularly eye-opening for me. In this movie, engineer/inventor Stanford Ovshinsky is painted as a hero whose revolutionary NiMH technology is suppressed, first by GM and then his company is bought out by Chevron-Texaco. Actually, there is debate out there whether Ovshinsky actually "sold out" to Big Oil for the money to save his ailing photovoltaic business, and criticism that he has spent more time and effort simply suing every other manufacturer of NiMH batteries rather than trying to promote and sell his own batteries, so it's unclear if he's the victim or a willing participant in holding back battery technology. Actually, this is an interesting taste of the claims that electric motor and battery technology is deliberately being held back. I can't vouch for its sources, but it raises enough questions to make you wonder. According to this webpage's argument, there are powerful forces backed by Big Oil, the military, and others that don't want to see advanced electric motors and batteries becoming commonly available, whether to reduce our demand for oil or to prevent the spread of long-range, ultra-quiet submarines.

Actually, from the movie, you get the impression that although interests like Big Oil are looking 10-20 years down the road, GM killed the EV1 because they could only see ahead to their next quarterly earnings report and the EV1 wasn't immediately profitable for them. How's that for strategic thinking? And to me, maybe confirms why GM is in such dire straits these days with no good alternatives to selling more full-size pickups and SUV's. There's an interesting factoid in the movie, the EV1 program was terminated the same year that GM bought the rights to the Hummer. Coincidence? Hmmm.

You walk away from the movie with the impression that the EV1, although not a perfect replacement for a regular car, was actually a perfectly viable car for many people and that the limitations of the car weren't what really led to its demise. So, who really killed the electric car? I guess it'll be the fodder for heated debate for years to come.