Who Killed the Electric Car?

I saw an amazing documentary on electric cars. I never even knew that there were such things as fully electric cars, but apparently just a few years ago all the major car companies were making them and leasing them out to people. Think of never having to go to a gas station again. You just plug it in at night and in the morning it's ready to go. The cars were fast, quiet, and super cheap - $3 worth of electricity could take you 100 miles. And virtually no maintenance needs, no oil changes, for instance, like in an internal combustion engine.

The people who got to drive them loved them, they were passionate about their cars. But GM and all the other car manufacturers yanked them off the market and even repossessed all the cars they had given out. They publicly promised to recycle them, but instead they crushed them and shredded them into landfill scrap at a site in the desert, almost like they were covering up a crime. The motivation was an unwillingness to change business-as-usual - they felt they could make more money pushing gas-guzzlers than by selling these cheap, efficient cars. With the support of oil companies and service stations who didn't want to lose business, the car companies even pressured California to repeal its law requiring a certain percentage of cars to be zero-emission.

As a result of this decision, air quality in California (already the worst in the nation) will remain appalling, smog will keep clouding the cities, children will continue to have asthma, and adults will suffer from chronic respiratory disease. It makes me so sick and angry, to think of all the human suffering that will result. We were so close. The law was passed, the technology was available, the cars were rolling off the assembly lines and being sold to customers. Yet industry still managed to squash the whole thing in order to line their own pockets.

I almost cried at the part in the movie where the electric car owners, who had been keeping a vigil outside the GM parking lot where their repossessed cars were being kept, had to watch them loaded onto car carriers and taken off to the crushing site. They tried to prevent it through nonviolent protest, but were arrested and hauled away. I know I'm probably just responding instinctively to the emotional concept of cars as these big, familiar domestic animals like oxen, to the symbolism of them being loaded up like Boxer in Animal Farm - but there are good, real reasons to feel upset about it. As long as corporations like GM and Texaco continue to have power to rearrange society to suit their needs, we will never be able to make any progress. The environmental problems that are pressing in on us will overcome us. It feels like a really hopeless situation.

Anyway, go see the movie - it's really good.