This film WILL frustrate you greatly. It's that simple. All of this talk about cars of the future with hydrogen fuel cells in 15 or 20 years from now is ridiculous. The car of the future was here, and they killed it. I won't say the first cars were perfect, but remember that NASA blew up a lot of rockets before getting it right, same with electric cars. The first ones could only do approx 80-100 miles on a charge. Most of us only commute that far to work, and these cars would have served us perfectly. Without one drop of gas. Battery technology has improved tremendously since then, and even while the EV was in production there were improvements. Mr. Paine presents a surprisingly balanced film that time and again exhibits mans' greed, stupidity, shortsightedness and another excellent example of American corporate stupidity. I firmly believe that General Motors would not be in the financial hole it is currently in if it continued exploring the electric car program. You have to start somewhere and GM, Ford, Toyota and Honda were the trailblazers and they all did it. Electric cars were built that not only worked, but worked well, and only would get better as battery technology improved. They did it because the State of California forced them to. The automakers pushed back and California blinked. It's no wonder that shortly thereafter all of the electric car programs were killed and the quiet destruction of most of the cars began. Some survived and are still in use. (An electric Toyota RAV4 sold on eBay in April 2006 for $60,000.) This film is successful not because of a political leaning one way or the other, but because of the flagrant lack of common sense on display by most parties, and on that level it's extremely frustrating because we have the technology to start reducing our dependence on oil now.
Review of Who Killed the Electric Car?
