Who Killed The Electric Car? Page #3

It wasn't going to be possible.

California was faced with the

prospect of "What do you do

"...if the car companies don't comply?"

So rather than do brinksmanship

about what would happen

if they didn't comply and stick with it,

they started negotiating,

a certain flexibility in the mandate.

California compromised

with the automakers

adopting a memorandum of agreement.

One of the agreements with the state

was that the automakers would build

and market electric vehicles

in accordance with demand.

If they didn't want to build more of them,

the car companies would have to make

the case that there was no demand.

The person will go unnamed,

but we were having a lunch in the executive

dining room at the GM tech center one day.

Just the two of us,

and he leans over to me and says:

"Dabels, you know something?

You are my worst enemy."

I asked why, and he said:

"I'm out there lobbying to show that

there's no demand for electric vehicles,

"and you're out there proving me wrong."

We would sit down with Hal Riney

or with executives from GM and discuss

how fast, how far, how much.

These were the three questions we were getting.

"Please put it in the advertising.

It's not rocket science."

And they would go back

and do the exact opposite.

We never saw a tv ad

with an electric car scampering

up the side of a hill

with a good looking man or

woman draped around it.

That's the way they sell cars.

How does it go without gas and air?

How does it go without

sparks and explosions?

How does it go without

gears or transmissions?

How does it go, you ask yourself?

And then, you will ask;

How did we go so long without it?

The electric car.

It isn't coming,

it's here.

What was the objective

of these advertisements?

Was it to entice consumers

or to scare them away?

Our goal at GM was to make the full

functioning, battery electric vehicle

a commercially viable business

opportunity for General Motors.

GM spokesman, Dave Barthmuss,

has worked for GM for nearly ten years.

We spent in excess of one billion

dollars to drive this market.

That means award-winning

advertising, developing the vehicle,

developing the recharging infrastructure.

In a four-year timeframe,

from roughly 1996 to 2000,

we were able to lease 800 EV1's.

We started this waiting list

in order to prove demand to GM,

but no matter how many

people we got on that list,

that was never considered enough demand.

Everything was anecdotal to GM.

We have heard about

these long waiting lists,

and frankly, we did have a

list of roughly 4000 people

that raised their hands and said:

"I would be interested in getting a new EV1

"and being an EV1 lessee."

We contacted each of those folks

and we riddled that list down.

And when we got down to

a point when we were able to have

somebody sign on the dotted line,

that list from 4000 people

shrunk to about 50.

Only recently did they finally

admit there actually was a waiting list

and tried to explain

it in the way of;

"By the time we explained all the limitations

of the car to them only 50 would sign up."

If you sincerely want to

market a product,

you don't start out by describing

the limitations of the product.

Tom Everhart is president

emeritus at Caltech.

He served on GM's board

of directors for 13 years.

I do not think General Motors tried hard

to get the electric cars out rapidly.

Whether the C.E.O. of General Motors

understood that, I don't know.

We had to ask permission of

who everyone to give a car to,

and by the end we were low on cars,

we had to write case statements.

We tried to put the cars

in hands of celebrities,

because they were the only ones

that stood a chance of getting the car.

The 3rd grade science teacher

didn't stand a chance.

I had to write a resume for Mel Gibson,

and what he'd done and accomplished,

because the people I was talking to

didn't believe that he warranted a car.

I was wondering:
"Why do I

have to fill this out?"

You had to tell them where

your birthmarks were.

I mean it was everything.

"Have you recently had

a proctoscope inserted into your..."

"Well, no."

You had to get really specific

about a whole bunch of things.

Consumers wanted it, but they

regarded it as a limited vehicle

and they expected to

pay a limited price for it.

And there's nothing irrational about

the consumer that said that to us.

That's a perfectly

reasonable statement.

"You're giving me a vehicle that

does less, I wanna pay less."

Okay.

But unfortunately, I

couldn't make it for less.

They argue things like money and that

they're too expensive to build,

yet they're building four a day.

They were very hand built cars,

with specialized components.

And had they mass-marketed them,

they of course would have come down.

As car companies made the

case there was no demand

electric vehicle advocates thought

they had a sympathetic ear

with the appointment of environmental

scientist, doctor Alan Lloyd

as chairman of the California Air Resources Board.

First time I presided over that,

I felt that the car companies

weren't making significant effort,

so i felt:
"Flog them harder.

Flog them often. They need to do better."

For the regulation - we felt it needed

to be changed drastically.

And there was some movement that way,

but it didn't go away.

While the car companies

fought the mandate in Sacramento,

GM quietly closed its EV1 assembly line

and began laying off its sales force.

All of a sudden, we were not only taken

off the project, but taken out of the company.

They started with the

ones with the most...

the biggest waiting lists,

and the most customers.

The primary areas were

the ones that they dismantled first.

And so, at the end of 2001,

that was it in terms of my

employment with General Motors.

Studying general Motors

practices over the years,

and I don't speak for

the engineers and scientists

who would really have liked to have done

a better job with motor vehicle technology,

but the executives at the top,

their motto seemed to have been:

"Going backwards into the future."

And that's what they've

been doing for decades.

As a veteran consumer advocate,

Ralph Nader used grassroots campaigns

to make cars safer

and more fuel efficient.

He's familiar with the tactics used

by the car industry to resist change.

There are all kinds of ways to take

and bring politicians to their knees.

Once the car companies

get a long delay time,

then they go to work,

eroding, eroding.

And than when the deadline is

approaching they say they can't do it

and there are going to

be terrible consequences.

Automakers took

the fight to a new level.

They sued

California's Air Resources Board.

GM led the lawsuit, soon joined

by Chrysler and several auto dealerships.

As California withered

under the pressure,

the carmakers

found a powerful new ally,

the federal government.

Shortly after joining the suit,

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