In the late 1990s and early 2000s, General Motors’ EV1s were the Apple Macs of cars. Ahead of their time, they were only driven by an enlightened “different” thinking few, but those that did felt passionately about their high tech machines.
A fully electric plug-in vehicle with a range of between 70 and 140 miles depending on model, the EV1 was first introduced into the marketplace in 1996. Available in limited test markets on a closed lease-only basis (whereby no actual purchase was allowed), it was developed by General Motors partly in response to the California Air Resources Board’s requirement that the seven major auto companies in the US had to make at least 2% of their output zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) by 1998 in order to sell any cars within the state (with further graduated steps stipulated up to 10% in 2003).
Though grudgingly produced by General Motors, the vehicle was beloved by the few consumers lucky enough to rise to the top of the company’s reportedly vast waiting list. But it was likely a car that was never intended to succeed. General Motors seemingly put more effort into fighting the CARB mandate in court than meeting existing demand for vehicles or marketing the EV1 to create even more. It was therefore not uncoincidental that the demise of the EV1 occurred in tandem with the gutting of CARB’s ZEV rules. The EV1 program was officially cancelled in 2003, and a total recall was put in motion, with repossessed cars being not only compacted but shredded for good measure too.
A 2006 documentary,
Who Killed The Electric Car, chronicled the crushing demise of this groundbreaking car. In it filmmaker Chris Paine highlighted the collusion of the auto industry, oil companies, and politicians, who all had a vested interest in seeing the electric vehicle die an untimely death alongside CARB’s environmentally prudent directives. Catching the zeitgeist, Who Killed The Electric was the third highest grossing documentary that year (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth being the first).
However, a decade after General Motors presided over the funeral of the EV1, the killing of the vehicle has proven to be a costly mistake. With gas prices rising, Toyota filled the rapidly increasing fuel-efficient void with their hybrid Prius, which went on sale in Japan in 1997. Following its worldwide debut in 2001, Toyota have sold over a million Prius cars in the US alone, and the rest of the auto industry has been scrabbling to catch up.
With revenge being served on a platter less than a decade on, Paine and his documentary team were compelled to reexamine the fortunes of the electric vehicle in a follow up film. The first had centered on activists working from outside the industry, with this film Paine chose to follow a diverse group of instigators working from within.
Revenge Of The Electric Car therefore features four EV evangelists who are attempting to drive the future of the automobile into the present: Bob Lutz (General Motors’ Vice Chairman up until May 2010), Elon Musk (Tesla Motors’s CEO), Carlos Ghosn (Nissan’s President and CEO), and Greg “Gadget” Abbot (a DIY electric engine retro-fitter).
SuicideGirls recently visited Paine at his ultra green home to talk about his cinematic “I told you so” and the electric awakening of a sluggish car industry that was in need of a shock. After checking out the 2008 Tesla Roadster parked in Paine’s garage, the irony was not lost that we were conversing about, and anticipating the dominance of, the gas-free vehicle in the heart of LA’s oil country amidst the pumpjack nodding donkeys of Baldwin Hills.
Nicole Powers: So let’s rewind and talk about the first film, and how all this began.
Chris Paine: Well, I had one of those cars. I had one and then they took it away. I dropped it off to have the tires checked for something, and [the GM dealership representative said], “Oh, you won’t be getting your car back.” I’m like, “My lease still has another nine months.” And he says, “Yeah, well we’re just going to keep it.” I said, “Well can I get my gym bag out of the car?” [He said,] “Oh, It’s already gone.” [I said,] “Well where has it gone?” [He said,] “We can’t tell you where it’s gone.” [I said,] “You can’t tell me where the car is gone?” And then, you know, the car companies were all saying, ”Well nobody wanted these cars…” And we go, this is just not the whole story…
So that film became an issue movie about two things. One about what happened to these cars. Because the trail was so hot, we could actually follow the step by step. I think that what happened when they took out the streetcars in the ‘50s, a lot of those trails got very cold and it was hard to like do it. We took the title from
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was really about streetcars in Los Angeles. That’s sort of the backstory.
Then we also thought that the film…it could’ve been about a lot of issues, it just happened to be about the electric car, about what happens with corporate lobbies that take over government. They eviscerate really good programs that are in the public good…for whatever corporate reasons they have. We busted both the oil industry through the Western States Petroleum for their astroturf campaigns, where they would pose as consumer groups but really just be the oil companies. They got behind stopping public funding of charging. And then the American Association of Automobile Manufacturers, which was behind trying to gut the regulation for zero emission vehicles.
The challenge of that film was to make an issue movie interesting and to keep the momentum going. This film, we decided we did the issue movie. People are a little bit issued out. There are so many things going on. Let’s make a movie that’s just about pure momentum –– characters and momentum…Like a regular narrative film. Because if we were going to do the issue movie, it would be 10 hours to do everything: coal, batteries, where does power come from, why gasoline is so bad, the history of the vehicle, etc. etc. This would take forever to get right. And if we can pick sort of four characters that represent different pieces of international business right now, and how sometimes from within you can get something going, it would be a different kind of message…
The reason to do did a different kind of momentum besides kind of an artistic experiment is that I found in 10 years of arguing for electric cars that there’s no winning the argument. Because while I think that the argument for electric cars is completely done, you can’t change most people’s minds through argument…What turns people are emotional experiences. The experience, for example, of driving in one of these plug-in cars…Suddenly all of your intellect goes to defending what you like as opposed to trying to beat someone in the argument. So that was kind of the idea for the film…Let’s just give people an experience, and maybe as a result they’ll want to go out and try one of these cars. That will probably do more to convince people than any amount of arguing about air or oil or anything else.
NP: A lot has changed in 10 years since
Who Killed the Electric Car? GM may have ended their electric car program, but Toyota and the Prius have been ruling the auto industry since then and everyone’s been scrabbling to catch up. There must be that temptation to say, “I told you so.”
CP: Well, I figure the “I told you so” is implicit in the word “revenge.” We got some push back from a couple of reviews saying, “It’s not a revenge.” But, if you can’t track that Hummer went bankrupt and that all the car companies went bankrupt and that all these things failed because they made so many stupid decisions in the ‘90s, then you weren’t paying attention because it’s a big reversal. The auto industry went from fighting tooth and nail to kill electric cars to being champions of them, and it’s just remarkable. I think it’s one reason that we decided to make another electric car film when we had no plans to do so when we finished the last one. Because you don’t usually see things turn around like that. And from some of the same people even.
NP: I could not believe that you got [GM Vice Chairman] Bob Lutz to participate in the movie. That’s kind of amazing. How did that even come about?
CP: He’s just brave. I think he convinced a lot of people at GM that never wanted us to come in the gates…The first interviews we had with him were pretty stiff, and over the three years that we were checking in with him, things became more relaxed and we got to really do a portrait of someone.
NP: When you decided to make this movie, how did the first contact come about?
CP: Dan Neil, [who was] at
The LA Times then, asked my opinion on the Volt, because it was suddenly announced that GM was going to work on a new electric car. I told him, “Hey, if they’re really going to do it, I would totally support it because that’s what we want them to do –– to make plug-in cars.” And then, I can’t quite remember the sequence, but Bob Lutz and I exchanged emails. I had his email address from the first movie for some reason. He said, “Are you really in favor of the Volt if we did that.” I go, “Yeah, I totally support that.” And he goes, “Oh, well, we’re really going to do it.”
Somewhere in there Elon Musk, who I knew because of the Tesla out there [indicates his garage], I asked him if I could start tracking his journey and he said, “Sure, come on in.” So, I told Bob Lutz, you know, I was tracking Elon, and Bob said, “Why don’t you come to the GM 100th Birthday Party.” So my producer, Jessie Deeter, she’s out of
Frontline, said, “Okay, well we have to be super careful because this is going to be cooption [because of the] massive spin machine we’re about to walk into. If we’re going to work with the car companies, we have to be really careful not to take any free gigs and not to go on junkets, and understand the difference between press and an actual access to something, and it’s going to be a very tricky balance for the next few years.” And it certainly was. But I think as time went on, we could begin to understand what was more authentic and what was less authentic, and choose those moments to put in the film. So that’s how it started. Once we had GM, we went to the other car companies, Toyota and Ford and everybody else, Fisker and Better Place in Israel. Some of them said no, and some of them made it very impossible to reach them. And some of them said yes, but their stories really changed a lot and they didn’t really work with for film, so we ended up with these four.
NP: So Nissan, how did that come about?
CP: Nissan. We approached them. We thought it would be a no for sure, because they’re a very secret company. Peter [co-writer and producer P.G. Morgan] and I were here and they asked if they could send two people to talk to us. We were over here. We met them for a ten o’ clock [meeting], just like this. Ding dong, two guys came in and they grilled us for about 90 minutes about the first film, what we were doing in this film, what we were doing at GM, and what our security provisions were for footage. Because Tesla had an IPO and GM was facing bankruptcy…we had a super secure editing process. If any of our footage got out it could adversely price the stock.
NP: Presumably you also had to have an internal Chinese wall where you would not be passing information along.
CP: Exactly. Exactly. They were competitive with each other. We told them all of our procedures and stuff. Then they said, “Thank you,” and they went to the door. I said, “Where are you guys going?” They said, “We’re going back to Japan.” They’d flown in –– [Nissan Chairman and CEO] Carlos [Ghosn] had sent them –– and then they flew back. Then about two days later we got permission to come to Japan to track Carlos. So all of our Japanese scenes started there. At one point we were all in one hotel room because we wouldn’t take their junket and there were no other hotel rooms. We were all on top of each other and we did sort of envy the other journalists that were there. Everybody’s like, “You guys, what are you doing? You think you’re being purists over here.”
NP: But it’s important…That integrity is lost a lot of the time these days.
CP: Yeah. It hurts me sometimes…We’ve had a couple of negative reviews where they’ve said “your film felt like a commercial” or “you got a little close to the companies.” You try figuring out this balance, it’s really hard to do it…It’s been a very tough balance. And the car companies are often annoyed at us, you know, it was challenging. But I think it came out all right, and we got kind of a portrait of different kinds of entrepreneurship in this country. It happens to be about cars…
NP: I love the fact that you have the independent guy working out of his warehouse/garage. I understand he’s a friend of yours?
CP: Yeah. When you drive down the road here, over the hill you can see the rebuilt, where he used to live. That’s the thing that burned down. So he was right there. I wasn’t thinking he was going to be in the film at first. Then the horrible fire happened, and he found that little controller in the ashes and it’s blinking, and he’s going, “We’re going to build it.” I’m like, well that’s the spirit of the film. Even if you’re in a huge corporation, you’ve got a lot of push back.
NP: Right, because GM were in the ashes too.
CP: Exactly. And the best people will rebuild. They don’t give up at that moment. They say, onwards. Elon, he’s a playboy with millions of dollars or whatever…
NP: And he almost went down to his last cent of PayPal money with Tesla.
CP: Everything…His ego stripped down and people attacking him on a personal level…You’ve got to be tough.
NP: From the very little guy to the very big guy, they all have this similar rising from the ashes story.
CP: Yeah, that’s sort of the story, exactly. I’m glad that came through.
NP: I was in a way surprised that there wasn’t much about the Prius in the movie given that that was very much the game changer.
CP: I know. Well, we mentioned it in the beginning that it was one of GM’s motivators, that they wanted to compete with Toyota, that they had run away with the efficient market. Bob Lutz says it. But we couldn’t get access to Toyota. They wouldn’t let us in for whatever reason.
NP: I guess because Toyota felt maybe that they didn’t need to give you access because they already owned the green market, whereas Nissan is trying to catch up to Toyota so they have the incentive to participate.
CP: I think so, and I think our first film really helped Toyota because they had the only product that was really efficient when gas prices hit $4.00 a gallon in the States. They were the only people that had an efficient relatively green car. Their sales went from loosing lots of money to really on the up and up. The other thing is…[with] the Prius, you could never plug it in.
NP: That was the frustration for me. It made no sense because it already had rechargeable batteries. All you needed was the ability to plug it into a wall, and you’d have never needed gas most of the time, because most car journeys are in the realm of less than 20 miles.
CP: Yeah, well there’s a reason for this. It’s not proven, but a lot of people believe that this is the reason; it’s because Chevron owned the technology for the nickel metal batteries which were in the Prius. There was a big closed settlement that happened about the time, right before our last movie came out, that Prius could indeed go ahead and use those batteries, even though Chevron owned the patents, but it had certain limitations. So a lot of people think the limitation was they could not put a plug on it. Whether that’s true or not, the reason that the plug is now coming in the Prius is that they’re switching to lithium batteries…But, it’s very difficult to prove that and we had to with all our films be very careful with our legal and all that.
NP: I remember in the first film there was the mom and pop operation that had developed this far superior battery, and their patent got bought just so that it could be put on ice.
CP: That was the company. That was it.
NP: Ah, Chevron was the company that bought their patent?
CP: Exactly…Iris [Ovshinsky] passed away right after the first film came out and we miss her a lot because she was actually the physicist in that relationship, or she had the PhD, and her husband [Stanford] was like the salesman. She was the quiet brains, you know.
NP: I had a conversation with
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — that discussion was more on the issue of coal –– but one of the things that he said was that basically the tipping point will come when it’s just plain cheaper to use green energy. One of the problems specifically with coal is that there’s so many subsidies that the price is artificially low. Are there similar economics going on in the car industry?
CP: Oh sure. I mean, the gasoline engine is almost fully amortized, because they developed it over 100 years. They know how to make thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of these at the lowest possible price. When you start a new kind of automobile, ie. with a motor and batteries, which in theory is much cheaper because you only have a few parts versus an entire engine, it takes a while for economies of scale to kick in. It’s hard for them to get their manufacturing price down to what the gas car is…That’s the first difficulty they have.
Now one thing they have going for them is that electricity is a lot cheaper. Even in the US where we’re 50% coal, electricity as a whole runs about $1.00 a gallon, compared to $4.00 for oil. That is a big cost advantage for the consumer. But the consumer will only make those changes when they’re really hurting at the gas pump. It happened the first time we paid $100 to refill our trucks and cars in 2008. When we’re paying that again, as fuel prices go up, and it’s hard to say how that will happen, but peak oil means that we’ll keep going up…Kennedy is absolutely right, it’s the price of gas that will push them to alternatives.
NP: Also the price of the actual cars is a problem. I recently had to buy a new car. I would’ve liked to have bought a Prius, but the difference was just too great. The Prius cost almost double what my car cost, and I get 28 mpg versus 40-something [highway] on the Prius –– because you can’t plug it in.
CP: Yeah, the prices are hugely important. I think that Carlos understands that. I think they all understand, and they’re trying to do that. But Nissan had to even raise their price on the Leaf recently. They raised it like $2,000. They’re not going to be able to compete with the $10,000 economy car. They can’t do that for a while. I think they will in time if all the people...that are buying $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 cars…step up to the plate.
The rest of us, that can only afford a $20,000 [car] or whatever else, this is where ride sharing and test drives [come in] —because every time someone goes down and test drives a plug-in car, they become a convert and they can tell someone else about it. This is only possible really now, that you can go to a dealership and test drive an electric car to feel and see what it’s all about.
I hope that our film is part of the inspiration for people to go out and check these things out because they couldn’t do it after they crushed all those cars in our [first] movie. They were almost impossible to find…I really believe that the experience of this is as important as any argument. Ultimately, of course, you’re right, it’s the price of these things, and the price of oil that will determine how fast this happens.
NP: Part of me wonders why GM, the moment the Prius started taking off, didn’t just reboot the EV1 since they already had the technology developed.
CP: Pride, I think.
NP: I think it was.
CP: Yeah. I mean, they say it’s because they were never able to get the costs down and that the car was costing them $100,00, but it didn’t have to cost that much. They could make that car much cheaper than that. So I think it’s pride. Also I think it’s why they got into so much trouble in California. Because they wanted to win the battle against California, they forgot about their brand. They obviously forgot about the environment and the consumer and everything else. It was a big disaster.
People say, “Well don’t you want General Motors to go bankrupt?” I’m like, I don’t particularly like car companies, but if these car companies go bankrupt it’s a huge allocation of resources to rebuild industries like this. You think the pollution is bad, it’s much better to use existing factories. Of course it’d be great if we rode bicycles and did public transportation, and this should happen, but the reality is we make tens of thousands of cars all the time so we should be making plug-in cars. General Motors is trying to do something about it. So why not? Because they’re American jobs. I mean, why do we need to import everything from China?
NP: When did you finish shooting this film?
CP: We finished shooting end of 2010.
NP: What updates from the intervening year would you like to have been able to include?
CP: I wanted to get in this idea that how much electricity is in every gallon of gasoline. Because you hear a lot of people say, “Oh, where does all the electricity come from?” Which is a very good question. And, “Isn’t it just coming from coal?” Before you even get there, think about who is one of the biggest users of electricity in the world. The answer is: it’s the oil industry. Because it takes a lot of electricity to turn black crude oil into gasoline. Like 4-7 kilowatt hours of energy. How much is that? If, instead of charging up the crude oil to make gasoline, you put the energy into a battery, you could drive your Leaf 20 or 25 miles, just on that electricity alone. Just on the refining. No Saudi Arabia. No shipping it over. No driving the truck to the gas station, no anything else. Just the refining. So there’s stuff like this that I would love to have in the movie because it’s data that people need to understand…to start using electricity wisely and not waste it converting fuels into other fuels…But again, every time we tried to detour into something like batteries from cars actually don’t end up in landfill and there’s actually only 1% or 2% lithium in a lithium battery, most of it is like completely benign –– every time we did that, the movie would stop moving…
And to answer your question, we wanted this movie to end when electric cars were actually available to people to buy again. Because the first movie ended when they were destroyed, so I said this movie is going to end when they’re actually in showrooms again. That was sort of our end point. Now, if we had kept it going, right now what would the story be? Well, Volt sales haven’t been that good. They were hoping to sell 10,000 and I think they’ve sold 4,000.
NP: Why do you think that is?
CP: Two reasons. One: they came in at a little high price point and they’ve lowered their price now. Two: they’ve marketed the car really strangely, and probably because they had too many focus groups. They’ve marketed the car as “more car than electric.” And nobody even knows what electric means. They should’ve just said “more car.” You know, it’s like it does more. It runs on two kinds of systems. GM, as good as their engineering is at least on electric cars, I think their marketing has always been a little bit confused…
NP: I think car companies a lot of the time only know how to market a car on machismo. Car commercials are always very testosterone driven…And it’s hard to market an electric vehicle on testosterone.
CP: Yeah.
NP: It’s like when you’re watching
Top Gear, it’s the running joke that the presenters hate…
CP: Electric cars.
NP: And the reason they hate electric cars is because they feel that they’re emasculating.
CP: Yeah. Well, that’d be a great movie. I’d love to do that. Or maybe a short. Maybe we just will. Because you know they got in trouble for defaming both Tesla and Nissan. Did you hear this?
NP: Yes.
CP: Screw those guys. It’s so important that this technology get a foot hold and when they set up bullshit that is not true, just to have a laugh on their show — they certainly shouldn’t be running on BBC on state run money…
NP: There needs to be a disclaimer if you’re presenting something that’s untrue during something that purports to be a consumer test on a factually based show.
CP: Of course. That guy can just go to hell. I’m glad that Nissan busted them in such a classy way with their own GPS data from the car. Did you hear that?
NP: No.
CP: That’s how they got them. Because, you know, he runs out of power in a disabled parking space…[And Nissan goes,] well actually, the GPS shows that you drove the car around the block for like about 40 miles before you even started your range test and we can see it. Here’s the map of where you went in your car. So why are you making this claim on your show that you ran out of power on a fair test? And they were like, “Err, it’s just a TV show.” Well, excuse me, I spent $6 billion developing a technology so we can get the fuck off of oil and you’re going to set me up like our cars can’t do anything? That’s not fair.
NP: Right, because it’s so much bigger than shits and giggles on a TV show. It’s about people in Iraq and Afghanistan dying.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Cluster bombing weddings of people that are there because they happen to be in the way, and British soldiers losing their arms because they’re trying to do the right thing. I’m glad your TV show has great ratings, but to hell with you. You can tell I’m pretty fired up about this. I’d love to take that guy down if I could. I know it’s a show people enjoy, but the mitts are off.
NP: I enjoy that show, but their attitude to green technology is one area of blindness that disappoints me. But I do think it does come down to this idea that electric vehicles are emasculating. People like the smell of gasoline –– it’s manly because it’s dirty….It goes back to your point about how GM doesn’t know how to market the Volt.
CP: And it went back to why the gasoline car took off in the first place. Because the women and the doctors would have the electric cars because they could keep their hands clean, they were quiet.
NP: Right,
we used to have electric cars back in the day.
CP: But the men who were making those purchase decisions, wanted noise, they wanted to feel like they were a lion roaring. Its all primal, the noise and all that. I think it’s one reason that Tesla did not put the word electric on their sports car, because they wanted to keep it a pure play – fast.
It’s not like trains continued forever. They were way sexier than a car is. More powerful. You have all the imagery from movies of trains and we thought they’d last forever… And I think the whole generation that gets electronics…people want their iPads and digital phones and none of them make noise and they’re incredibly sexy…The electric car is like that. It’s a 21st century [thing]. Jeremy can live in 1955 with his masturbating teenage boys all he wants but a lot of us have moved on.
NP: If
Electric Car was a trilogy like
Lord of the Rings or
Star Wars, what do you hope the third movie would be?
CP: The third movie?…I was thinking about that this morning…I thought if nobody buys these cars and the oil price drops to $3.00 a gallon again and everybody decides to get out for awhile, then it’s going to be
Curse of the Electric Car –– if we kept the monster theme going. I hope that doesn’t happen. I’d like to see my next movie be about bicycles, because I just see in so many cities around the world bicycle is really having a renaissance right now, and it’s terrific.
NP: What’s happening in London with the
Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, where you can just pay £1 [$1.50] and rent a bike for 24-hours, and just leave it in any bike station when you’re done – it’s amazing. When I lived in London, my commute to work used to be a bicycle ride through Richmond Park amongst all the deer. But I would not ride a bicycle in LA because I’d be dead within a week. The basic problem is the cycle lanes are also the bus lanes that are also the right turn lanes –– that’s a recipe for death.
CP: I know. You’re exactly right. If you go to Washington, DC they have concrete barriers protecting you from the vehicle trains.
NP: I think the cycle lanes here are more of a hazard than a help because it gives people a false sense of security.
CP: I agree. LA would be an interesting place to tell that story because you do have a strong community, we have the midnight rides, we have government that wants bicycles to succeed. But you’re up against a huge generational pushback…This is a generational thing, I think. I’m very attracted to doing something about bicycles but a lot of bicycle movies are being made and the trick is how do you find a subject you can reach a lot of people on that’s not just another bicycle movie. How do you make it exciting and sexy? I think that we figured out how to do that, to a certain extent, in our
Electric Car films. Because you wouldn’t know that there were maybe stories locked in there that would be interesting to most people. I’m sure that’s true for bicycles too, it’s just you never know where it is.
NP: Well, going back to your
Who Framed Roger Rabbit theme, in The Valley they’re actually turning the old rail tracks into bicycle tracks. Wouldn’t that be amazing if they did that with the trolley tracks all the way down to Santa Monica Blvd., so you could ride all the way down from Hollywood to the Beach.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. And there’s a lot of people that care about them. I think, for electric cars it’s going to be another five years before we get another feeling for it –– maybe ten. I was amazed that this turned around as fast as it did, from “we’re going to kill every one” to “oh, we all want to make them.” I mean, Mercedes, BMW, they all want to do it now. When they switched from horses to cars, that took about 20 years, so I think we have to give just a little bit of time.
NP: Another 10 years, halfway through the process.
CP: Yeah, I think so. And for everybody to understand that gasoline is not forever and that the environmental stuff is real.
D 
So, I had to get this shirt:
I had bronchitis and an ear infection just a few weeks ago and I think with all the stress and lack of sleep from working so much these last two months I never really gave my body a chance to get healthy, so I am sick AGAIN.
Yarr!!!!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!!
