Everybody made fun of the EV-1. Well, everybody but Tom Hanks, Ed Begley, Jr. and the other California owners who held a protest/wake in Burbank last year for GM's decision to kill the revolutionary - but mileage-challenged - electric car.
The common wisdom - or at least the talking point bruited about by GM and parroted by every mainstream media outlet writing about the EV-1's demise - was that the car failed to generate enough buyers.
The demand issue is perhaps the most intriguing. It is true that only about 800 electric vehicles were leased between 1996, when they first came on the market, and 2003, when they were unceremoniously yanked off again. But a lot of that had to do with the near-total absence of advertising. As Dave Freeman, a power-grid administrator, says in the film: "We never saw a TV ad with an electric car scampering up a hill with a good-looking man or woman draped around it. That's the way they sell cars."
A former GM employee and EV activist called Chelsea Sexton unearthed evidence that GM, contrary to its rhetoric about lack of demand, was sitting on a waiting-list of 4,000 interested customers. GM responded that really only about 50 of those 4,000 people were genuinely interested.
The film looks fascinating - and points damning fingers at a number of potential EV-1 foes: the Bush administration - pushing hydrogen fuel-cell tech that is years away from viability; Big Oil (for obvious reasons; impatient owners; and the short-sighted GM itself.
As the film points out, the company decided it would rather sell people popular, gas-sucking Hummers now than sink a little more R and D into extending the charge-time and driving range of the EV-1 so that more people would buy it in the future as gas grows more precious.
Where would we be today if they had kept the EV-1 rolling? A helluva lot closer to a sustainable energy economy in California, that's for sure.
Next time you pour $60 into your tank at the pump, don't take it out on the hapless clerk behind the bulletproof window. Think about who really deserves your anger.
