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Ronald Saumure

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Obituary for car that worked too well

Intelligent film on electric car's demise shuns loud rhetoric

Katherine Monk, CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, August 26, 2006

Who Killed the Electric Car? ****

Directed and written by: Chris Paine

Rated: G

Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, through Monday

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Few movies have the power to make viewers as angry as Who Killed the Electric Car? -- because regardless of which side of the climate change issue you happen to find yourself, there's no debating the importance of developing an alternative technology to oil, because it's a limited resource.

Who Killed the Electric Car? is all about developing alternative technologies, the brilliant engineers at large corporations who make it happen, and the myriad forces at play trying to inhibit progress and maintain the status quo

-- regardless of how unhealthy it might be, or how much time and money was spent in the lab.

Without making the easy play for emotional and irrational arguments to back up his position, filmmaker Chris Paine simply investigates the tragic history of the EV-1 -- General Motors' cutting-edge electric car that miraculously boasted "zero emissions."

The car was the answer to California's zero-emissions mandate, a policy that was prompted by health concerns about the state's poor air quality at the end of the 1980s. The mandate required car manufacturers to develop and market zero-emissions vehicles. By 2003, 10 per cent of vehicles in California were supposed to be clean.

That never materialized because the mandate was scrapped after car companies challenged California in the courts -- and won. The first victim was the EV-1, which wasn't only pulled from production, but was pulled from the streets.

Considering the car was immensely popular with those who had a chance to drive one -- they were notoriously difficult to lease, and impossible to buy -- it's hard to imagine why a profit-oriented entity such as GM would have scrapped a line of vehicles that was not only mechanically successful, but appeared to be remoulding the entire idea of personal transportation.

First-time director Paine opens the film with a staged funeral for the EV-1, and at first glance, the rag-tag group of mourners in bad black suits seems a little too self-righteous and loud to be all that interesting, or all that sympathetic. They look like any other loud-mouth group of vested activists screaming like mad dogs, barking from behind a chainlink fence at prey they will never taste.

It's not a strong beginning, and it almost feels as if Paine's movie will be just another loud volley from the counterculture -- assailing all that is loved and precious about the current world order.

Yet, within just a few minutes, the movie changes intellectual gears and we're suddenly immersed in a fascinating history of the automobile and American energy policy.

We learn the internal combustion engine was actually considered an inferior technology to electric at the dawn of the auto age. Not only was it louder and dirtier than electric, but you had to crank the engine in order to start the car -- unlike the push-button electric vehicles that first rolled across American roadways.

As Paine investigates the rise and fall of the first electrics, different pieces of the puzzle come to the fore, and Paine skilfully draws each jigsaw piece as a character before we even ramp up to the discussion of what finally happened to the EV-1.

Setting the stage with a careful eye to dramaturgy, we begin to move through different time frames in order to understand the complex and interwoven histories of cars and the oil industry.

Paine doesn't have to intercut his narrative with title cards explaining who's "good" and who's "bad." He doesn't have to use a narrator to scratch at the underlying issue.

The beauty of Paine's film is how he brings everything to the surface without relying on any carny tricks.

He pulls it off because he points his camera at everyone, and lets every side of the issue articulate their point of view.

Whether it's the engineers who developed the technology, the salespeople who were assigned to move the vehicles in the showroom, the many drivers -- including celebrities such as Mel Gibson -- who raved about the car's quickness and futuristic styling, or the official GM spokespeople who say the EV-1 failed because consumers didn't want them, Paine gives everyone his or her time at the microphone.

They all seem sincere, and they all have some valid points to make, but as the movie progresses, and Paine paints a picture of what could have been, the outlines of the immense tragedy of the EV-1's destruction emerges from the smog.

The electric vehicle not only worked exceedingly well, it offered a new hope for an oil-free tomorrow and put North American technology back at the top of the heap. Through Paine's film, we taste a renaissance pride in American know-how that's truly exhilarating.

To watch all that hope end at the scrapyard -- reduced to shards of metal no bigger than a fist -- is nothing short of sickening. It's like watching the Avro Arrow cut to pieces with an acetylene torch. Paine doesn't have to say it for

us: The lost potential is so great, it's haunting.