Who Killed The Electric Car? Page #7

The electric car is an

interesting case study.

It was such an abysmal failure,

that there are a lot of people

involved in the initial decision making

that are pointing fingers

at whose responsibility it is.

To Basrah and all of Iraq comes good

news with the opening of a new oil field.

The pipeline runs across the

desert to the Persian Gulf at Al Faw.

There, tankers load up with the

precious fuel the world needs so badly.

Yes, it's a big day for Iraq,

and there's a feast to celebrate.

Sheep stuffed with rice

and host of other good things.

But that's only the first of the good

things that will come to Iraq, thanks to oil.

Oil companies have rarely

shied away from global issues.

But why did they lobby so

hard to build a public opposition

to the electric car in California?

I find it difficult to rationalize

why the oil industry got so

intimately involved in this.

Other than maybe

they saw it as a threat

to the monopoly they had on

providing the transportation fuel.

There's no question that the oil companies

who control the market today

have a strong incentive

to discourage alternatives,

except the alternatives

that they themselves control.

Just as General Motors,

40 or 50 years ago, bought up

the trolley systems and shut them down,

the oil companies have opposed

the creation of an electric infrastructure.

I differ strongly with that.

We did not kill the electric car.

The petroleum industry

did not kill the electric car.

What killed the electric car

was antiquated technology.

It's a good example of

something we should not repeat,

an example we need to avoid.

There's still roughly a trillion barrels

worth of oil in the Earth's crust.

And if you figure that the average price

of that subsequent oil will be 100 $ a barrel,

that's a 100 trillion dollars

worth of business yet to be done.

However, at some point when

an alternative is good enough,

people will snap over, and that's

what the oil companies fear the most.

We use 180 million gallons

of gasoline a week in California.

Right now, the price is 2,20 $.

A year ago, it was 1,20 $.

There's a dollar more a gallon.

Somebody's making 180

million dollars more a week.

It's the same gas, the same

pipeline, the same refinery.

The profits are outstanding.

What the oil companies feared,

is that electric vehicles would

become successful six years from now.

What the automobile

companies feared,

was that they'd be losing money

on electric vehicles in the next six months.

Even as car companies made electric

cars, they fought them at every step.

What was their motive?

Why were they so determined

to take them off the road?

I think in the beginning,

General Motors didn't believe

the car would catch on.

I don't think they'd thought

they'd ever have to worry about

something like a conspiracy to keep it

from happening. They hated the mandate.

They hated it so much that they

ended up not really wanting

to be in the business of EV's.

What I detected was a huge

resentment about being told

what type of motor

vehicle had to be made.

And it became a fight of

principle rather than one of trying

to technologically

solve the problem.

I do know that I was surprised

at some of the stances they took

in Sacramento in arguing.

End of comment.

In a confidential 1995 memo

the American Automobile

Manufacturers Association

sought to hire a PR firm

to manage a so-called

"grassroots and educational campaign"

to create a climate

to repeal the mandate.

The challenge,

according to the document,

was "greater consumer

acceptance of electric vehicles."

Why would the car companies campaign

so hard against their own creation?

I made the case at the

General Motors board,

that the reason for the EV1

was to give General Motors

a very big head start

in how you transform electricity

into the drive power of a car.

And we give them two or three years lead,

and in my judgement it did.

But my frustration was

they didn't capitalize on the lead.

And the reason, which

was discussed with the board,

was that there was not a

profit seemed to be coming out

of either electric cars or hybrids.

They could not understand how

Toyota could possibly make a profit

out of the Prius, for example.

They were gonna lose their shirt.

And as evidence have shown,

I don't think Toyota is losing their shirt.

If loss of revenue

worried car companies

than the electric car posed

another problem altogether:

it had no internal combustion engine,

the cornerstone of the auto industry.

These parts represent a large

part of a dealership's income,

through the replacement

and the maintenance.

Esentially, this group of parts

is a visual representation

of the profits the auto industry

doesn't make when they sell an EV1,

or an EV in general.

I can actually identify a lot of these

that didn't get used on the EV1 program.

Oil filters you need

four times a year.

It was the most prominent thing,

along with several

quarts of oil every time.

I didn't enjoy working on the

internal combustion engines,

just due to the fact

you got so dirty.

And working on the EV1, I

basically go home looking like this.

Servicing the EV1 was pretty simple.

It came in about every 5000 miles.

We'd rotate the tires, add washer fluid

to it, and send it back out on the street.

It's amazing. Look how dirty

I've gotten just handling this stuff.

It's kind of sad.

In order to sincerely

market a clean car,

you have to suggest

that your core product is dirty,

that it uses oil, that it uses gas,

and that increases our

dependance on foreign oil.

And here's this

product that doesn't.

It looks very schizophrenic,

but I think, when it started...

"We can show the people in California

we can meet the zero

emission requirements."

And later on:
"Do we

want to show them?"

"That means, all of

our other cars..."

But the more it caught on, the more

that there was this dichotomy

between clean and efficient and

non-polluting versus a Suburban.

Car companies

had convinced themselves

that they couldn't make money

in the short term with the electric car.

In order to do that, they would

need an entirely different vehicle.

General Motors made a

commitment to the Hummer,

because they could see that

the Hummer would make them money.

When SUV's first came out,

people said:
"I can't drive that."

- "That big old truck?"

- Especially for the ladies.

- "I can't see out of there."

- "I'm going to murder somebody in that."

- "That's too big."

- "That's too big for me."

- But they convinced people. "This is safer."

- "You need this car."

- "You need a big car."

- "This is a safe car."

- "You need this for your family."

- "Bigger, safer."

The idea of a penny-pinching EV1

that was super-green,

that didn't get a lot attraction.

Whereas the idea of a gigantic SUV

that would crush your neighbor,

that did get a lot attraction.

Basically, that tells us

what the 90's was about.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes