Let me begin by saying that the electric car at the time this film was made was a lot of wishful thinking by the green energy political movement. This country is a carbon based society and will be for some time to come. That’s not to say that green energy is not important and that in the future will play a major role in this country, but that time has not yet arrived. Personal opinion. Now, who killed the electric car? Just as the movie outlined, there were many powerful forces that worked to kill the car.
General Motors worked to kill the car in several ways. Poor marketing and by not investing properly in new battery technologies, that would of made the electric car a more viable option to the internal combustion engine to the public at large, to name a few.GM went so far as to buy controlling interest in the leading battery research company at the time to virtually kill the innovations that were being realized at the time. Not only would that, but the cost to the car companies at the time of the mandates from the California Air Research Board, (CARB), have been enormous. Infrastructure, retooling factories and training of the labor force would have cost untold sums of money on a technology that was unproven at the time. The next and some would argue which was the biggest obstacle to the electric car was the oil industry. The oil industry has a lot of political clout in this country and would have fought tooth and nail to kill this project. The industry would have