"Who Killed the Electric Car?"

One of the films at this year's Seattle International Film Festival (largest in the US) was a documentary called, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" If it happens to show up where you live, I'd recommend seeing it. After watching it, I had even less sympathy for GM than I had before.

The facts: Under pressure from California's zero emissions law, GM, Honda, Toyota and Chrysler actually produced viable and practical electric cars. The main character of the movie is EV1, the electric two seater produced by GM. There was a budding infrastructure that created charging stations for these cars, but they could also be easily charged at home. For some reason, which the movie attempts to explore, electric cars were forcibly removed from the marketplace and destroyed.

The questions: Who or what was behind the destruction of the electric car? Possible culprits: Big Oil, fearing competition from a viable non-petroleum source; The consumer, blithely ignorant and indifferent to fossil fuel burning and hampered by incorrect ideas about electric cars; GM (et al) who were making way more money selling SUV's and didn't want the dichotomy of two contradictory propulsion systems in the same vehicle lineup.
And, also, GM's incredibly stupid managment; California's Clean Air Commission who caved under pressure from GM and repealed the zero emission law......anyway, it's an interesting movie.

There is a good plug (no pun) for the Prius, which was created in response to the California law.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jun 13 2006, 09:20 AM) [snapback]270263[/snapback]</div>

My concern is for the families who will be immediately impacted by a failure at GM. Most of southern Michigan is auto dependent and, as we have seen, most of southern Michigan has at times done well by the auto industry and at other times been totally screwed over (witness Flint, Michigan) by plant closures and layoffs.

What I find particularly galling is that the CEO's and board people who make the idiotic decisions that cause so much grief, are themselves highly compensated. There seem to be few or no consequences for egregiously bad decision making and planning in corporate America. In Japan, heads would have rolled if decisions like those made at GM were made at Toyota, Honda, etc. Japanese corporate capitalism has its own sets of evil, I'm sure, but their corporate structure would appear more accountable to the public good.

No, I wouldn't celebrate the bankruptcy of GM in part because it would essentially be only a bailout of management and a screwing of the workforce, not a truly behavior-changing experience for GM. If the management had bothered to seriously examine the future of oil, the obvious impact of autos on the environment, and hired the requisite engineering and design personnel to accomplish an intelligent transformation to new technologies INSTEAD of squandering millions of dollars buying Congress and hiring lawyers, they wouldn't be in this position. So, in some way, it is poetic justice. But again, the culprits will escape and the workers will be left staring at vacant plants and idle assembly lines.

How bad does it need to get in this country before people wake up to the fact that we don't have a democracy, we have an oligarchy? What I find more baffling is how so many working class people voted for Bush, Cheney, et al, who hardly have the workers' interests at heart.

Bob