Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6705 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-03-19
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Hindi
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 89 minutes

Amazon.co.uk
It begins with a solemn funeral…for a car. By the end of Chris Paine's lively and informative documentary, the idea doesn't seem quite so strange. As narrator Martin Sheen notes, "They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline." Paine proceeds to show how this unique vehicle came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California's Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person's terms (director Alex Gibney, Oscar-nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, served as consulting producer). And everyone gets the chance to have their say: engineers, politicians, protesters, and petroleum spokespeople--even celebrity drivers, like Peter Horton, Alexandra Paul, and a wild man beard-sporting Mel Gibson. But the most persuasive participant is former Saturn employee Chelsea Sexton. Promoting the benefits of the EV1 was more than a job to her, and she continues to lobby for more environmentally friendly options. Who Killed the Electric Car? is, otherwise, a tremendously sobering experience. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Synopsis
In the 1990s, following California's passing of the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, American car companies began producing electric cars for mainstream consumption. GM's EV1, which was by all accounts quiet, fast, and capable of driving up to 80 miles on one charge, used no gasoline and quickly developed an intensely devoted following in California. But even as its popularity grew, car manufacturers were fighting the mandate; it was overturned, and by 2005 just about every single EV1 had been recalled, crushed, and shredded. GM put its resources into the Hummer instead. WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? looks at the tangled web of interests behind the car's untimely demise, laying out convincing cases against the auto industry, big oil, corrupt federal and state governments, and consumers themselves. Chris Paine's directorial debut is not especially stylish, but it is effective. He leads viewers through the twisty maze of politics and profit that surrounds the main story, taking time to dwell on the passionate attachment that many of the cars' drivers still feel for them. Appropriately, the film is narrated by Martin Sheen--the embodiment for many Americans of socially conscious leadership, thanks to his many years on THE WEST WING--and features interviews with a motley array of celebrities from Mel Gibson to Ed Begley, Jr., but the real star of the movie is the doomed car itself and all that it stands for. The film is not especially fair or balanced; very little screen time is devoted to criticism of electric cars, and the only person on camera defending the oil companies is a singularly slimy and unappealing spokesperson from whom most viewers would be unwilling to buy a used car of any variety. But it certainly succeeds as a rousing, if occasionally depressing, call to awareness and action.

Customer Reviews

GM EV-1 ,we will not forget you
This great documentary, directed by Chris Paine shows the last days of the electric cars being dramatically taken from their owners to be destroyed.

I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in electric vehicles and being non Dependant on petrol.

I heard about this documentary in several internet pages discussing cars with low environmental impact, and it took me a while to get it, I bought form amazon.com (USA) region 1 and had to watch it in my computer.

I am glad this is now available in region 2 at a reasonable price (marketplace that is ).

The people who owned the cars felt very passionately about them and had real love for their cars and for they represented, it is heart breaking to see them being taken away in front of their eyes and how General Motors did its utmost to shred to small pieces.

The movie then goes to explore the several factors involved in the making of electric cars and the future possibilities of it ,including new batteries and solar panels , needless to say the car and oil industry will try very hard for them not the be available for the general public for a long time.

Sadly for us in Europe the range of electric cars is appallingly bad, there nothing but a glorified children's toy with an incredible short range and they look ugly, they are also most impractical.

There are some "super-hybrid" (125 mpg , plug-in hybrid with a range of 60 miles on electric ) cars that will be launched in them market before 2010 ,but nothing compared to the beauty of the GM EV-1 which hit the roads in 1996.

I feel that the oil and car industry killed the electric car but maybe in the , no so far , future the electric car will kill the oil industry and I hope to be around to watch it .

Let's suck some serious amps
Probably the most alarming thing about this story of how the electric car was literally destroyed is what it reveals about the power of corporations to control our lives. Film maker Chris Paine, himself an EV1 owner, makes it clear that it was big corporations, especially big oil, and most especially General Motors itself, that woke up one day and asked themselves the multi-billion dollar question: Is an economical and efficient electric vehicle really good for business? In the case of the oil companies, obviously not since such a vehicle would not be burning any gas or needing any motor oil. In the case of the car manufacturers themselves, especially GM, which actually spent some very serious bucks on developing the EV1, the answer came as a bit of a surprise. First of all, they asked themselves, in the long run are you going to make more money building small efficient vehicles or behemoths like the Hummer? It didn't take long for them to figure out that the profit margins would be higher with the bigger vehicles. And then they realized that with the EV1 they wouldn't be able to sell many of their combustion-engine parts like oil filters and such. Furthermore, the EV1 was built to comply with California law. Doing some more thinking, GM realized that it would never do to allow some state government to tell them what to manufacture. If things worked out in California, before you know it, the whole nation might very well go plug-in.

So, as shown so vividly in this documentary, the car manufactures and the oil companies bought up or scared enough politicians so that the law requiring zero emissions in California went the way of the dodo. Meanwhile GM, which had been leasing the EV1, recalled them all and literally destroyed them. Paine has some nice footage showing the brand new and near brand new cars being crushed while EV1 lovers protested in vain. Nationally of course we know about the bills congress passed allowing truck-sized vehicles to continue to guzzle gas (mostly SUVs) and how 6,000-pound vehicles were given massive tax breaks for small business owners (mostly anybody but a wage earner).

There is of course plenty of controversy about whether the story presented by Paine (narration by Martin Sheen, by the way) is fair and accurate. I did a little research--there is a ton of information on the Web--and what became obvious after not too long was that the electric car not only is a viable alternative to the combustion engine car but really is the wave of the future whether General Motors and the other car manufacturers know it or not. For now, however, they are not about to change their ways. They have too much of a vested interest in business as it is.

The hydrogen fuel cell red herring is addressed, and, with help from Joseph J. Romm, who wrote The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate (2004), which I highly recommend, got fed to the dogs. Naturally there is a clip of George W. Bush pretending to support the hydrogen fuel cell car, even though I am sure he knows that economically it's not even close to a match for the electric car. Getting the Great Prevaricator to advance the propaganda put out by the oil and vehicle companies surely is something close to proof positive that it's BS.

Especially watchable is the clip from Huell Howser's PBS show in which we get to see the EV1s not only being crushed but pulverized into little bits for recycling.

So, what's it all about, Alfie? It's just as Eisenhower warned: beware not just of the industrial-military complex taking over our lives, but beware of corporations in general buying up all the politicians and writing all the laws. In fact, with the way the mass electorate is influenced by advertizing, only politicians pre-approved through campaign donations from big corporations have a chance of even getting the nomination of either of the two main political parties. And without that nomination, effectively speaking, they can't win.

Regardless of all the machinations by GM, et al., I think our grandchildren will be driving mostly electric vehicles with nary a gas station in sight. And they will be inundated with "green" ads in the media with lots of flowers and little girls paid for by General Motors and Toyota, telling us how they are responsible for the shiny, new clean world.

Highly charged, undeniably thought-provoking and ultimately upsetting
In a film that will make you angry and disheartened, director Chris Paine explores the ominous confluence of big business and government and their efforts to get rid of the electric car, which ten years ago, looked as though it was going to set the automotive world on fire.

The reasons behinds reasons for the electric car's disappearance include corporate collusion and greed, governmental spinelessness and oil company propaganda. This does documentary does an excellent job of laying out what actually happened.

When General Motors terminated all leases of its fleet of fast, sleek EV's - the vehicle was never made available for purchase - the company ended up sending them to the crusher as Honda, Toyota and Ford also would pull their fleets off the streets. Determined to find out who ultimately was responsible stopping production, Paine cleverly structures his movie like a murder mystery, lining up the list of suspects and then methodically going through them.

In addition to the car companies and obviously the oil companies, who have grown accustomed to selling nearly 3 billion gallons of gas a week, fingers are also are pointed at the California Air Resources Board, which backed off of its original Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate under pressure from the auto industry and the Bush Administration (go figure).

While Paine, himself a one-time EV1 lessee, is unabashedly partial to the promise of electric-car technology over petrol, he includes interviewees who don't even agree a crime ever occurred and they argue that there was just lack of demand which ended the scant supply. Of course, oil companies ran ads claiming that the electric car was an environmental hazard and the public was just too shortsighted to see through the lies.

Later, the oil companies and the car manufacturers bought the rights to the electric car battery technology. And as Paine gathers such converts as Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Peter Horton and Alexandra Paul who talk about the advantages of having the car and how great it actually was, we see the gradual collusion of corporate and government interests gradually unfold.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes a compelling case that the current discussion of hydrogen cell technology, as the successor to the internal combustion engine, but the movie also makes the point that hydrogen technology isn't nearly as efficient as electrical technology. The hydrogen cell is still decades away from being perfected, whilst the electric car was close to being practical - the cars were actually on the road!

And although the film ends on an optimistic note - with the current popularity of hybrid vehicles - it's still upsetting to see all these new clean electric cars - a hope for the future - being crushed, mangled and shredded.