“Who Killed The Electric Car?” Not Us!!
The whole concept of this film pissed me off so I didn’t bother seeing it until a couple of weeks ago. Turns out it’s a pretty good film, but it draws some lamebrained conclusions.
The title is a misnomer because it’s really about “who killed the GM EV-1.” The film is presented in three distinct parts: history, trial, and verdict. Under indictment are everyone involved in the EV-1 situation: consumers, battery tech, the oil industry, the car industry, the feds, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the hydrogen fuel cell. The filmmaker declared everyone culpable, with the exception of battery tech.
Let’s dispense with the most obvious mistake - battery tech, by the filmmaker’s standards, was indeed guilty of not being mature/cost effective enough to save the EV-1. The EV-1 started out with crappy lead-acid batteries and was later improved with Ni-MH batteries but they were expensive - so expensive that the price of the EV-1, had it been for sale, would have been around $44K assuming mass production economies of scale. The battery packs would have needed replacing every 3 years or so, at a cost of around $7K. The filmmaker didn’t overlook this, he just didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. Nor was it a big deal to him that the cars could only go around 100 miles on a charge, and took hours to refuel. Gasoline beat batteries in every single practical category back then - only now that gas prices are high and new battery tech has been developed (largely due to the consumer electronics/laptop computer industries) are we seeing the economics start to converge.
The biggest problem I had with the film, though, was that the filmmaker didn’t attempt to determine who was MOST guilty. And based on the facts of the first part of the film, it’s pretty clear why - it would have led to the unavoidable conclusion that the CARB was the most guilty, albeit for reasons other than the filmmaker suggests.
GM produced the EV-1 (then called the Impact) in the late 80s as a proof-of-concept car. For better or worse they started promoting it. The CARB seized upon this and created the ill-fated Zero Emmissions Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate in 1990, specifying that within eight years, two percent of all new cars sold in CA would have to meet zero emission standards. Not all cars bought - all cars sold. The CARB took what would have been an outstanding innovation and turned it into a provocation - “Now that you showed us you CAN make a zero emission car, we’re going to FORCE you, and everyone else, to make them.”
Had the ZEV never been enacted, who knows what would have happened. It is entirely possible that the emphasis would have shifted to hybrids several years earlier, as the car companies found purely electric vehicles to be too expensive and impractical. Instead, the big companies decided that fighting ZEV would be more cost effective than producing EV-1s. ZEV was modified in 2003, allowing GM and the rest to claim a big victory. Meanwhile, Honda and Toyota claimed the greenie high ground with the first hybrids.
The CARB was the most guilty, followed by battery tech. The third most guilty party was not even ‘tried’ by the filmmaker - the low price of gas in the 90s. Consumers don’t care about energy efficiency when fuel prices are low - this goes for gas, heating oil, natural gas, and electricity. Low gas prices ensured that the battery cost premium made electric cars unattractive to consumers. Consumers were most definitely NOT guilty of ANYTHING in this saga other than being smart shoppers.
Following the low price of gas, I suppose you can put the Feds in there, as long as you remove hydrogen fuel cells from the indictment. Hydrogen fuel cells are vapor technology from a practical standpoint - yet for some reason the Feds have touted them as a viable replacement to the internal combustion engine. Ironically, electric car battery tech is almost ready for prime time, and will be here decades before cost-effective hydrogen fuel cells.
I am still trying to figure out what GM and the rest were guilty of, other than treating this as a business problem rather than an environmental problem. For every greenie celebrity who loved leasing the EV-1 there would be tens of thousands of consumers who wouldn’t even consider it due to lack of range and high cost.
Not interested in getting into the oil conspiracy theories here, but I guess you can blame them some too. So let’s make the final ranking of the guilty:
1. CARB
2. Battery tech
3. Low price of gas in the 90s
4. Feds touting hydrogen panacea
5. Oil company shadow conspiracy gimmee
Not guilty: consumers, car companies
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[...] Customer Experience - what is the unique customer experience in driving an electric car? Silent operation, rapid accelleration, zero emissions, and a coolness factor since most electric cars are pretty unique looking. But it’s the experience of OWNING an electric car that will make or break the ‘disruptive’ factor of the EESTOR technology. And right now, the cards are stacked against them. Refueling is part of the customer experience - people are used to refueling their cars quickly. Although the EESTOR unit boasts a fast recharge time, as I discussed in my electric car article you’ll need special high-power recharge stations that currently don’t exist (and won’t exist until the demand for them exists - Catch 22 right there). So you’ll be stuck with recharging at home, which will take a while. Long recharge times are one of the main things that made the original electric cars unappealing to customers. [...]
i would like to get blueprints for the elec. system please!
Call GM for Cevy-VOLT specs or Tesla Motors do you need more?
[...] my article on ‘Who Killed The Electric Car?’ last year, I emphasized the fact that no one wanted an expensive, inconvenient-to-operate electric [...]