UnderwoodWhoKilledTheElectricCar

Who Killed The Electric Car?

Who Killed the Electric Car was directed by Tom Paine and released in 2006. It details the journey of the electric car, from the early days of automobiles, to the present day (well, present when it was released).

Back in the 1800’s, when automobiles first started coming into being, there were three types of cars, gas, electric and steam. Steam had many problems, and quickly fell by the wayside, but for quite a while, gas and electric cars were both very prominent in the automobile industry. They both competed and developed side by side, and 100 years ago, there were actually more electric cars than there were gas cars. But then gas cars got an edge when automatic starters were developed and the low price of oil helped gas cars to skyrocket in popularity while the electric car faded quietly (pun intended) into the background.

In the 1990’s though, the electric car made a brief comeback. This was due in part to California’s zero emissions law, where a certain percentage of cars a company produced had to be zero emissions, with this percentage increasing incrementally every few years. Because of this law, car companies had to start producing electric cars, GM’s EV1 being one of the first on the market. A lot of people really loved the EV1 and were really excited about it, but there weren’t very many of these people, because a lot of people never actually heard about it. How is this? Well, GM and most other car companies didn’t really want to make electric cars, and fought California on the zero emissions law. When the law was repealed, all of the companies quickly took all of their electric vehicles off the road, and destroyed them. Why did all this happen? There are a number of reasons.

One reason is the oil companies. The electric car was a threat to their future profits. At first, it wouldn’t have much effect, since not that many people would have it and there wasn’t an infrastructure in place for electric cars yet. But in the future, when electric cars became more widespread and the technologies got better, electric cars would start to compete with gas cars, and maybe even take over as the dominant car type. And that would hurt the oil companies’ profits, which they didn’t want. So they helped the automakers in their lawsuits against California, and also bought rights to certain batteries and technologies that would make electric cars much better, so that they couldn’t actually be used in electric cars.

This brings us to the automakers. Why did they kill one of their own products? Well, the first reason is that electric cars are much less profitable for them than gas cars. Gas cars have many parts that require a lot of maintenance, repair, and replacement. Electric cars do not, they really only have batteries and a motor. Without all these parts, automakers are losing a lot of money because they can no longer charge for new parts, or repair and maintenance. Many automakers also resented being told what they had to produce by California.

Another problem is the government. The government has been refusing to regulate things like emissions from cars. Jimmy Carter was the last president to give priority to energy policy, and because of him the average car mpg rose from 12 to 20, but as soon as he left office, Reagan deregulated much of the oil industry. When Clinton came into office, he made some headway in regulation of the auto industry by compromising with them to get them to make hybrids, but these hybrids never made it onto the road, because as soon as Bush took over, all the auto makers stopped ‘bothering’ with hybrids. (Ironically/awesomely, Japanese companies who feared being out competed by the hybrids the American companies were researching actually did release hybrids for sale, and they are really popular.) The Federal government also aided the car and oil companies in suing California, saying the zero emissions law could not actually be enforced. Another problem is the California Air Resources Board, which after taking an initial stand by making the zero emissions law, caved under pressure and repealed it, despite strong evidence that the electric cars could actually make a difference in the smog levels and that the technology existed.

Along with all these things, there is also a problem with the idea of a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car. Basically, the promise of hydrogen cars competed with electric cars for the focus of research. Hydrogen won, because there are lots of ways to make money off of hydrogen cars—they use possibly dangerous fuel that would need to be stored at special filling stations (rather than just being able to plug in at your house), and would require maintenance to make sure everything was running smoothly. However, electric cars are much more feasible than hydrogen cars. Hydrogen Fuel Cells are still in their infancy, while electric batteries are quite advanced. Making hydrogen cars is also really expensive, the fuel is really expensive, and a large infrastructure would need to be built for distributing hydrogen, like our current gasoline infrastructure. There is also a problem that there is no physically possible way for a car to store enough hydrogen on board to give a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car the range that consumers want.

All these things combined to ‘kill’ the electric car. As such, I’m not really sure what we could do to solve this problem. Electric cars would be a great way to decrease our effect on the environment, but with the entire automobile industry against them, there’s not a whole lot we can do. As we saw in the movie, protesting isn’t really helping the matter much. As such, I’m not sure of the purpose of the film, because it can’t convince people to do much. I guess it’s more for techies and electric car fanatics, people who are already interested in the subject matter. The film does suggest a few things, like converting a car to electric yourself, which, although very do-able (I actually thought about converting my own car a few years ago), is a very daunting task, and most people really don’t have the know-how necessary to be confident to do so. The film’s website ([|http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com]) is actually much more helpful on the ‘what do I do now?’ side than the film is itself, listing numerous organizations who are taking a stand on the issue. Some of the ones I really liked are [], which is promoting the use of technology we have today, rather than technology we hope to have in the future, [], which has a similar purpose, with an emphasis on education, [], which is about stopping our oil dependence, and [], which is a directory to find local business making/converting electric cars, repairing them, maintaining them, and the like. I think the latter is the most direct action a person can take really, buying an electric car from someone other than the big car companies or converting their own, and showing them that we know what we want, and can get it whether or not they want us to.