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Trailer for "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

Comedienne Phyllis Diller fondly remembers her family’s electric car, circa 1920. “What happened to them?” she asks.

It’s a question Who Killed the Electric Car? addresses in a much more recent context. In the very early years of the American automobile industry, electric batteries were the most prevalent power sources for automobiles. By Diller’s childhood, the internal combustion engine had supplemented them.

We all know what environmental, geo-political and other hazards reliance on gasoline engines has engendered, and this crisply effective documentary marshals the case again by relating a series of events that involved the struggle for a particular alternative.

In 1990, the California legislature enacted the Vehicle Zero Emission Mandate, a statutory plan for eventually reaching a complete absence of CO2 production by motor vehicles. Automobile companies had been tinkering with electric propulsion for some years, and at several, especially General Motors, what looked like genuine efforts to translate studies into actual, marketable cars began.

By 1996, GM had ready the EV-1, an ostensibly practical vehicle for ordinary people. GM chair Roger Smith—previously Michael Moore’s stalkee—announced its appearance with appropriate fanfare. Relatively ordinary people and some distinctly out-of-the-ordinary ones leased the first electric cars and most of them gave the EV-1 their support. Mel Gibson promoted it. (Okay, maybe currently he’s not the best example.) Tom Hanks joked to Dave Letterman that he was helping to save America.

Then this small tide turned, the result, argues director Chris Paine (through narrator Martin Sheen), of conspiratorial collaboration by the power, automobile and petroleum industries. The cars were taken back from enthusiastic drivers and most were scrapped. Why this happened is what Paine’s film attempts to explain. In essence, it’s an old story: Decades before, the auto industry and its allies had helped prevent Los Angeles from installing a rapid transit system.

Paine’s case may not be airtight, but it’s also not unpersuasive. Except for a blatantly truth-aversive flack from GM, the alleged perps don’t put up much of a defense.

It may be another version of an old story, but it’s worth revisiting.