What Chris Paine's documentary presents is a pattern of greed that systematically clobbered the industries and communities involved with electrically powered and alternative fuel vehicles, and turned Los Angeles into a key hub of car culture and oil dependence.

Never mind that electric cars existed, alongside steam and oil powered vehicles, during the automobile's infancy; as Who Killed the Electric Car? reveals, the destruction of electrically powered public transportation vehicles - like Los Angeles' huge streetcar system - came from a mess of corporate conspiracy that happened so fast and slickly that local governments were unable to repair the damage long after charges were laid against members of the oil and auto industry: rails had already been torn out, streetcars had already been turned into scrap, and cities had nothing but cars and GM-built buses to move people from place to place.

What's truly disheartening about the saga of the GM-built EV1 electric car is how the company completely removed all traces of the product after its touted debut. Unlike the Tucker automobile, the cars were never wholly sold to customers, but leased; and with GM retaining ownership, every car had to be returned upon demand, after which its eradication began by being flattened and ground up into a metallic mulch until snooping reporters managed to get snapshots of GM's surreptitious activities, and desperate former owners demanded to know why they simply couldn't buy the damn car.

The reasons according to the doc's director were somewhat messy: GM never expected (or wanted) the car to succeed, and had the misfortune of establishing a great band of technicians who designed a car so smart and efficient, auto mechanics made little money from replacing parts, because the key pieces that make money –like mufflers – didn't exist on the EV1. A solidly built car was counter-productive to the auto industry's bread and butter parts business, so the machine was marketed using a ridiculously arty campaign that obfuscated its practical and attractive qualities, and made it seem faddish. That yielded low sales, and justified the cancellation of the electric car project in one fairly rapid swoop.

Critical lobbyists heaped bales of misinformation even when the car proved itself useful for local trips, and its second wave of batteries were found to be superior to the more problematic first batch. Add local governments who bent under corporate pressure, unrealistic deadlines for California's zero emissions plan (ZEV), and the car was legislated from a mandatory alternative fuel vehicle to a loser product and automotive joke.

Director Paine pointedly examines the various perceptions, misinformation and documented facts about electric technology and the auto industry's current arguments for hybrid cars and trendy funding of ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells, and he closes the doc with what may be the most indignant act ever perpetrated on a modern car: donated by GM to the Petersen Automotive Museum, the last EV1 is now a neutered invention that's a mere 10 years old, housed in a concrete vault, were it'll never been seen by anyone except a security guard or curator.

(The EV1's saga oddly recalls the tragic Avro Arrow program which was officially scrapped by the Canadian government in the fifties because of costs, with every blueprint and plane ordered destroyed. Whether it was out of fear that the designs might be stolen or copied, it just seems intolerable that a mass-produced invention like the EV1 wasn't allowed to survive, even as fully functional museum pieces.)

Parallel to this story – and further detailed in a separate deleted scenes gallery – is the Think car, which Ford imported from Norway and had also planned to erase due to low sales, until protestors embarrassed the company, and U.S. owners were allowed to buy the cars, with the remaining cars shipped back to Norway.

Additional deleted scenes offer some longer shots and extra interview material, but the most poignant remains a snippet with Chelsea Sexton, who visits the last EV1 in the auto museum, and is saddened that a sophisticated machine she helped create has been shuttered like a fossil in a museum drawer.

The film's director also drove an EV1, and before surrendering the vehicle to GM, he took a camera crew and shot footage showing the car in action, and while the montage is too commercially slick and brief to satisfy car fans, it's one of the few independent records of the car in use before it was erased from the history books.

Additional footage of the car also appears in the featurette “Jump-Starting the Future,” which assembles several of the film's experts and filmmakers, including the director, executive producer Dean Devlin, and actors Peter Horton for a postscript to alternative fuel vehicles created after the EVI's desmise, and the current state of electric cars.

For car fans, it's perhaps one of the greatest tragedies in automotive history, and certainly outlines the events that helped in the furthering of urban sprawl, as subsequently examined in the recent Canadian doc, The End of Suburbia.

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan