Electric Dreams
I finally had the opportunity to watch “Who Killed The Electric Car,” the 2006 documentary about the tragic fate of the EV1 electric car built and, ultimately, destroyed by General Motors. Many viewers may find this movie much ado about nothing, and, indeed, my brother, who is generally sympathetic to this cause, found it boring. Not surprisingly, however, I found it riveting. The passion shared by the EV1 owners and the GM employees responsible for selling and servicing the car was palpable. Any product that can engender this type of loyalty has to be considered a success. Maybe that’s the problem with the automakers: they don’t really understand the definition of success. The movie is also fascinating because it shows once again how the automakers are so distracted by the effort to maintain the status quo that they short circuit the technology and neuter the ingenuity that could ultimately save their futures. A culture of innovation is difficult to create when employees perceive that a company is not working to compete based on the best product. At the same time that GM was making delusional claims about the lack of demand for electric vehicles and the last of the EV1s was being crushed, the company had fallen hopelessly behind in the race to commercialize hybrid technology and had begun working feverishly to “catch up” with Toyota and Honda. The mystery of the movie is not who killed the EV1, but why a company would willingly surrender the lead in developing revolutionary technology to the competition.
The movie attempts to be equitable in assigning the blame for killing the electric car; fingers are pointed at many parties, including consumers. American drivers are notoriously two-faced about their cars: they profess a concern for the environment and our dependence on oil but demonstrate a complete lack of backbone when drooling over cupholders and DVD players while shopping for that next car. For simple-minded oligopolists like the U.S. automakers, repeated consumer weakness for horsepower, size and frills sends a much stronger signal than the faint cries of a small but loyal contingent of drivers seeking a reliable, low emissions vehicle. As Alex Taylor in Fortune writes (hat tip to Greg Mankiw’s blog):
Bush is reviving an urban legend that the technology is cheaply available if only the lazy old automakers would bother to use it. We should be so lucky. Making people save gas by buying thriftier cars, as General Motors executive Bob Lutz has said, is like telling people to lose weight by wearing smaller clothes. Yes, the technology is available - but at a cost.
Taylor advocates for a graduated gas tax to save consumers from themselves, but, in whatever form, the government has responsibility for rebalancing the incentives to encourage less driving and a resistance to overbuilt, oversized impractical vehicles.
The movie ends on an inspiring note, highlighting the substantial progress that continues to made, primarily in the form of hybrids. The next evolutionary stage, and the hope for the EV1 fanatics, is the addition of plug-in capabilities to existing hybrid technology. The ability to recharge a hybrid’s batteries would dramatically improve the already impressive fuel economy of the cars. As such, plug-in hybrids, more so than fuel cells and biofuels, offer the most realistic prospects for further improvements in fuel efficiency. One of the stars of the movie, and an ex-GM salesperson for the EV1, heads up a group called Plug In America, which has transformed the remains of the effort to save the various EV models from demolition, into an advocacy group for plug-in technology. In addition, PGE, a California utility, is anticipating a plugged-in world by working to upgrade its power grid to provide renewable power for plug in vehicles and turn the vehicles into nodes of distributed power capable of returning power to the grid when not in use. With the utilities part of the solution, the lack of an infrastructure for recharging electric and hybrid cars is no longer an obstacle. EV1s may be dead, but the prospects for the electric car are too far out of the bottle to ever be crushed again.