Dir. Chris Paine
Writ. Chris Paine

Ok. So this movie worked. I, a die-hard republican, the kind of guy who is proud to say on Earth Day, Brian Felts, Proudly manipulating the environment since 1971, feel guilty about owning an SUV. This documentary gives a good argument as the reasons to the events that led to the demise of the electric car. I found that unlike Michael Moore, director/writer Chris Paine allows the other side to present its argument, and quite honestly, lie to the camera. Who Killed the Electric Car is a good documentary that liberals/environmentalists will applaud, and make non-believers wake up, well probably not, but they should.

In 1990, the great lame state of California, passed a law that told the car dealers of the world that if you want to sell cars in their state, a certain percentage have to be zero emissions cars. So the car dealers, primarily General Motors, started working on an all electric car. Sure enough, a few years later, GM produced the EV, and it was popular. Hollywood types like Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks went on national TV to talk about the glories of the EV. They all had leased EV's and supposedly there was a demand, or was there? GM, and by then other car companies, stating that there was no demand, and they were too expensive to make, and a host of other reasons, ceased the production of the EV. Around the same time that this happened, the lawsuit brought by the auto makers against the California Law was successful and the law was overturned. Since the cars were leased, GM repossessed all of their cars, even though the owners of the leased cars wanted to buy them outright. Buy 2005, the last EV on the California road was returned to GM. That is not the end, however. The cars are not sitting on the lot some where, but were they were taken to a car smasher and then shredded. Every car that was produced was shredded and all of the engineers working at GM were fired from their jobs.

The reason why I think this documentary is good is because Paine address every reason why the Auto Makers used for discontinuing production of the car, and disputed it. He allowed the representative of the auto makers to state their case, and the Paine did a good job of discrediting what he said. Paine used Engineer's from GM, the inventor of the battery for the cars, the members of those lawmakers responsible for overturning the law, and those Hollywood types to argue his point. It was wonderful to watch the auto representative state that the EV's were not going to be destroyed and while he is saying that, pictures of destroyed EV's are rolling across the screen. Even the Hollywood types were ok, if a too little melodramatic, but not wacko Michael Moore irrational, just passionate. Actually Tom Hanks bit was when he was on David Letterman and that is where I first heard of the electric car.

The movie was not long at all and it did not feel like a documentary, i.e. stale. This is easily one of the better documentaries I have seen, probably since The Fog of War. I hope it gets nominated for Best Documentary, right now it is the only one I have seen that is deserved of it.

Brian - the Naked Gun