Who Killed the Electric Car -- Washington Post Review

The 7/21/06 Washinton Post had a really snarky review of "Who Killed the Electric Car", accessible at this URL:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6072001744.html

The review falls into the category that I would call right-wing political correctness.

I read the review, went to see the movie Saturday, stewed about it Sunday, and sent this letter to the Washington Post today. I'm not the sort of person who writes letters to the editor, and I don't think the Post will publish it, so I'd like to put it here for those who'd care to read it.

Before I do, I'd like to say that I'm not darelldd's acolyte, I just happen to think he's basically right about what he says about electric cars. Also, I'm not looking for a discussion, I just want to get this off my chest. Here goes:



Despite reading your review of "Who Killed the Electric Car" (7/21/06), I decided to see the movie.

Seeing the movie and reading the review, I'd have to say that the key phrases in the review are: "I commute 74 miles a day" and "those of us stuck in gas guzzlers". So, the Post assigned a guy who's so proud of driving 74 miles a day in a gas guzzler that he puts it in the paper … to review a movie about an electric car?

The results were predictable, but it’s really a shame. Between the sneering tone of the review, the errors of fact, and the errors of omission, you've probably discouraged some people from seeing this movie who might have benefited from it. If that's the purpose of your movie reviews, then bravo, well done.

Here's a number from the movie that people might have wanted to hear: 60 cents a gallon for gas. That's the equivalent of the cost of the electricity used to run an electric vehicle (EV). Half the CO2 emissions. That's how much better an EV does than a comparable gas car. I've checked both of these against several sources and they appear roughly correct. But your reviewer for some reason decided to characterize that CO2 reduction as "you still have to consume a hell of a lot of fossil fuel, in the form of big, messy chunks of carbon called coal, or natural gas". I think the correct statement would have been "a hell of a lot less of fossil fuel, …" At least the part about coal containing carbon was right, for those readers who didn't know that.

I found some parts of the review absolutely unfathomable. The entire point of the movie is that GM didn't just stop making the EV-1, GM literally rounded them all up and destroyed these completely functional cars. By itself, that's pretty interesting. But your reviewer describes the cars as "mysteriously disappearing". No mystery there. GM called them in off lease and scrapped them. Nobody disputes that. The only mystery is why GM and others did it, not what happened to them.

The reason this dreadful review hit home is that I bought a Prius last year. I guess that makes me biased. Or maybe just smart. (As opposed to the reviewer, who is biased but merely smart-mouthed.) The same sort of condescending nonsense that your reviewer wrote about EVs has been written about the Prius, always by people who can't be bothered to get the facts straight, pretend that they understand how markets work, and throw out a lot of scare talk instead of doing a little arithmetic

But these days I guess it's all about style, not substance. So when your reviewer combined scintillating humor ("Sparky the Wonder Car") with misinformation (60 miles between charges), I guess I wasn’t supposed to notice the error of fact. As stated in the movie, the EV-1's that GM destroyed went about 120 miles between charges. The Toyota RAV4 EV goes about 150. Presumably the range of a modern EV would be modestly higher due to improvements in battery technology. Even if your reviewer couldn't bother to pay attention to the movie, he might have considered spending 60 seconds to look it up on Wikipedia (where the absolute maximum range for the EV-1 is listed as 150 miles).

My point here is that sneering at electric cars is just so 20th century. It helps America to be a little bit stupider, and thereby helps the Japanese beat us to EVs the way they beat us to the Prius. That’s not the sort of thinking that made America great and put a man on the moon, it’s the sort of thinking that keeps us embroiled in Middle Eastern wars.

Instead, I think people ought to be encouraged to see this movie to broaden their minds a bit. Look at these good-looking cars driving around, maybe do a little arithmetic about how much you'd save using the equivalent of 60-cent-a-gallon gas, and think about how often you need to drive more than (say) 150 miles in a day. With essentially zero maintenance. All completely feasible, right now. Using domestic fuel, not Middle Eastern oil. And then realize that you can't buy one. Period. None. Tough luck.

Well, that's an exaggeration. A few hundred RAV4 EVs were sold outright, not leased. A RAV4 EV with 33,000 miles on it sold on Ebay 7/9/06 for $55,000. Pretty good price for a "nerdy-looking battery-operated near-car", in your reviewer's terms. Was the buyer foolish, or is your reviewer biased? Or maybe the high market price for a used EV is telling us something useful. But I guess your reviewer was too busy to Google "RAV4 EV" and read the results.

I'd like to think that one of the major car companies will offer an EV soon, but you just can’t tell. It's certainly a risk. Batteries are expensive. And car dealers will hate EVs -- surveys show that roughly half their profits are from service and parts, which EVs largely will not need. But battery technology continues to improve, and the consumer economics are becoming pretty compelling. As a Ph.D. economist, I have to believe that sooner or later the markets are going to exploit that opportunity. No car fits all needs. But people like me are going to buy EVs, not because it's better for the environment (which it is), or because it has become completely technically feasible (which it has), or because it largely uses domestic fuel (instead of Middle Eastern oil), but because it's an extremely cheap way to drive around.

Do the math. I bought a Prius because it cost about the same as the alternatives (Camry, Taurus) to purchase, but will burn about $12,000 less gasoline over the ten years I expect to drive the car (10K city miles per year, $3/gallon.) The same arithmetic says the fuel and maintenance savings for a hypothetical all-electric Prius would amount to roughly $18,000, over ten years, compared to a Taurus or Camry. That's a pretty big bargain.

So, use your brains a little. Right now, my Prius has a hundred-pound battery and two electric motors, and they work flawlessly. Oh, and a gas engine, and that runs pretty well too. That whole package makes the car very cheap, in the long run. Sooner rather than later, it's going to be a no-brainer to toss the engine, add more battery, and watch the resulting car sell. Because it'll do most of what people want a car for, but will be even cheaper. It's no longer a huge step. I just wish an American company would have the brains and the guts to do it, instead of the Japanese. Maybe Americans won’t buy electric cars despite a low cost of operation. But its pretty damn certain they won't if they never get to hear about it. In keeping people away from this movie, you've done your part to keep America stupider.

Sincerely,

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Marlin @ Jul 24 2006, 10:15 AM) [snapback]291384[/snapback]</div>

I'm no particular believer or disbeliever in conspiracy theories. There may be something in what you say here. I wouldn't know about a Federal law requiring a minimum level of aftermarket support (other than having to honor the warrantee like any other car.) Found nothing to support that with a quick search, but wouldn't even know where to look in the US code to find it.

On the one hand, GM had a revenue stream of about maybe $5M/year from the leased fleet (800 cars * $500 month * 12 months). In two states, where their mechanics already knew about them. They had another bunch of vehicles that were not out to lease (I'm thinking parts here). Maybe it was a marginal money-loser at that point, maybe not. I'm sure if you loaded enough overhead onto it, your accountants could make it appear a money-loser. But I could also believe that if you treated the costs up to that point as sunk, it might have paid its own way from that point forward.

My understanding of how Toyota solved this for the RAV4 EVs that it sold is that service is available where they sold them, but not nationwide. I think the last guy selling one on Ebay said that. So if you brought one to the East Coast, you couldn't expect Toyota to fix it. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

I vaguely recall GM's initial rationale was that it was dangerous to leave the vehicles on the road due to the potential for fires as the battery packs aged. That's as good as any other reason they stated.

Anyway, that really wasn't the main thrust of my statement. Really, it was that the review said the cars disappeared mysteriously, which was incorrect. They were scrapped even though they still ran OK. It's plausible that GM did that based on a pure dollars-and-sense viewpoint. Maybe my viewpoint is colored by the fact that the first car I ever owned was a Chevrolet Vega (aluminum engine, total failure), but I could also believe GM may have done it for essentially non-economic reasons. Certainly at that point, the underlying profits or losses would have been trivial to GM, unless the aging-battery-pack scenario was real, in which case I could see that the threat of lawsuit might have been enough to get the cars off the road.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(darelldd @ Jul 25 2006, 10:16 PM) [snapback]292344[/snapback]</div>

Darell,

For what it's worth, I carefully reread the Wikipedia article on the EV-1. They make it pretty clear that the 10-year support rule was "corporate policy", hence failure to support would have been "against corporate policy". And we all know the penalties for that. The article appears otherwise well-written. Had there been a legal basis, it seems like that would have been mentioned. So barring other information, I conclude that it was "against corporate policy". That's not quite as lame as you can get, but it's clearly pretty lame.