Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

Last Wednesday's showing of the film Who killed the Electric Car at the library in Nobleton didn't go exactly as planned.

The panel discussion that was to follow the showing was hampered by the fact the panelists didn't show up, owing to scheduling conflicts or being otherwise engaged.

So the talk took on the form of a verbal free-for-all between about 20 people who stayed for it, but in the end, somewhat to my surprise, there seemed to be some general agreement.

The film, made in 2006, has been referred to as a documentary, although I would question that a bit. But while I question its objectivity, I'll grant that it raised issues that should be discussed in the open.

Briefly, it looked into General Motors' development in the early 1990s of the EV1, which was the first car operating on electricity and batteries to have been manufactured in decades. It was a product of GM's Saturn division (I was once a happy Saturn owner).

The idea behind the car was to prevent gas emissions and the serious impacts they have on the environment, and there was a lot of interest in the product in California.

The cars were leased for between $250 and $500 per month, but were never offered for sale, which I guess explains how GM was able to pull them all from the road eventually, despite the film's assertion of protests from the happy EV1 drivers. One of them was quoted as saying few of them were inclined to fight legal battles to keep their cars because they had too much to lose.

"I have never seen a company so cannibalistic about its own product before," another said.

Despite substantial offers to buy the cars, GM, according to the film, never responded, and had them crushed in a desert area of Arizona. There were also charges GM made only half-hearted efforts to market the cars.

As is often the case with projects like this, there was little effort made to get GM's side of the story. But there was plenty of efforts to point fingers of blame, at such easy targets as car companies, oil companies, government (both George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger were, in my opinion, made to look foolish).

The film was narrated by Martin Sheen, who I don't think will ever be a poster boy for corporate America.

One of the problems I had with the movie, and I was relieved that I wasn't the only one who picked up on this, was the implication that batteries was the only way to go. It pooh-poohed such proposed alternatives as hydrogen fuel cells.

But those are the negative points I found in the film. The premise was interesting, and I think most of us can agree that the travelling public (even confining ourselves to North America for the moment) is not going to be able to get by on gasoline power for ever. I was intrigued by the idea of an electric car, although I think it is clear that GM made very little effort to spread the word about it. I was a member of the car-buying public when this work was going on, and fuel efficiency has always been on my list of priorities when shopping. Yet most of what was told in the film was news to me.

Now it was clear from where I was sitting that the EV1 was not the be-all and end-all in terms of cars. I don't think I would have been able to use it, simply because the battery was good for some 100 miles per day, and that wouldn't answer my needs in my line of work. But there are a lot of people who could be well-served by such a car. My wife springs readily to mind. And we're talking about the state of batteries a couple of years ago. There would likely have been some progress, possibly to the point where I could have been accommodated. Compare how long your cell phone battery will hold a charge today to how long it would have 10 years ago.

The list of "suspects" in the film did get a couple of words in, and one point that was made was these cars would represent an increase in demand for electricity, meaning more ways would be needed to generate it, such as through coal.

That issue came up briefly in the discussion that followed, with some agreement that if millions of people started driving cars like the EV1, it would have an impact on the power grid. And that could lead to some environmental problems.

But the reality is we are people, and people are always going to have an impact on the environment; usually negative. True, there are a lot of ways we can try to minimize those impacts, and a lot of us do try. Alas there are a lot who do not. I was impressed with the number of people I saw picking up litter Saturday in various places around King. But I later realized that I saw dozens of people cleaning up the mess made by hundreds, if not thousands.

So yeah, increased demand for electricity might cause us some troubles, but as I stated before, that's not the only alternative, nor is there any reason for things to be mutually exclusive. Why can't cars running on batteries be part of the solution, along with cars that utilize hydrogen cells and vehicles that continue to run on good oldfashion gas?

One of the villains identified in the movie was corporate America. That's always a convenient target, and sometimes the criticism is deserved.

I am essentially a capitalist (apologies are neither owing or offered), and I know the capitalist system has done a lot of good over the years, but it has also done a hell of a lot of harm, which has resulted in such outfits as labour unions, and they have done a lot of good, as well as a hell of a lot of harm.

Corporations like GM and oil companies are in business to make a profit, and the money they take are spread throughout the monetary system, contributing to the income of each and every one of us. Let's keep that in mind before we all go jumping on the band wagon the movie was trying to launch.

But if anyone can come up with a reasonably priced, battery operated car that can travel, say 200 miles per day, let me know.