Who Killed the Electric Car?

Ladies and gentleman, we are gathered here today

to bereave the loss of something dear to us.

We are here today to say goodbye to a special friend,

to say goodbye to an idea.

Some might say that to be here gathered today

to mourn the loss of a car would be going too far.

In 1996, electric cars began to appear

on roads all over California.

They were quiet and fast,

produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline.

Ten years later, these futuristic cars were almost entirely gone.

What happened?

Why should we be haunted

by the ghost of the electric car?

This wasn't the first time the electric car was killed.

One hundred years ago, there were more electrics on the road

than there were gas cars.

For many people, electric cars were the car of choice.

They were quiet and smooth and could be charged at home.

Gas cars, by comparison, required cranking and produced exhaust.

Well, the reason I'm here, I'm so old I remember electric cars

when they were around in the beginning.

I would have been about six years old on the way to the symphony

in that darling little electric car.

They were very quiet, and it had beveled glass windows.

It was almost like sitting inside of a huge lamp.

What happened?

Why did the gas car win over the electric car?

As the 20th century gathered speed,

the electric car lost momentum.

Automatic starters, cheaper oil

and mass production gave the edge to the gasoline car.

By 1920, the internal combustion engine

had won the race for control of the roads,

and the modern automobile age was born.

Of the hundreds of millions of cars built in the 20th century,

almost none were electric.

They were sleek. They were fast.

And they gave Americans the open road.

But as time went on, their number one flaw became more apparent.

Smog.

California has the worst air quality in the nation.

And it impacts some of our largest population centers.

Up in my district, we have what is called the black cloud of death

that hangs over the port areas

and the areas surrounding the ports.

We are seeing some tremendously debilitating effects,

asthma rates, cancer rates, uh, lung development in children,

children not being allowed to play outside.

In 1989, a study found

that one out of four 15 to 25 year olds in Los Angeles County

had severe lung lesions and chronic respiratory disease.

In 1990, there were 41 stage-one smog alerts.

No matter what kind of car we drive,

every gallon of gas we burn

adds 19 pounds of carbon dioxide to the air.

The more gas we burn, the more CO2 we create.

If you don't do something with that CO2,

if you don't sequester it,

then it's gonna be going up into the atmosphere,

and CO2 is a global warming gas.

I believe the problems

of, uh, global warming will be far greater

than the problems of social security

or even the problems of war on terrorism.

We've got the equivalent of a nuclear time bomb

on our hand with global warming.

If lung disease from air pollution is unimportant,

if all those things don't count,

uh, we're gonna be in bad trouble.

And there's a public health crisis.

But we have to have incentives,

and we have to have alternatives.

Car companies experimented with alternatives

over the years, but none of them ever seemed

to make it out of the proving grounds.

I remember I... I was the chairman of the board

of the Tennessee Valley Authority,

and we were promoting the electric car back in the late '70s.

I had even planned a race

from Gatlinburg, Tennessee to Nashville

between Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

And I had it all lined up, and then I realized

that we'd get a lot of national publicity,

but there were no... there were no cars in the showrooms.

It would take a different kind of race

to make the electric car the car of the future.

The Sunraycer was a solar-powered vehicle

that was developed here at AeroVironment,

uh, for the purpose of winning a race.

In 1987, GM won

the World Solar Challenge race in Australia

with a one-of-a-kind, solar-powered electric vehicle,

the Sunraycer.

Emboldened by their success, GM's CEO, Roger Smith,

challenged the same design team to build a prototype

for a practical electric car.

If we were to go full speed ahead with electric cars,

the electronics had to be good enough

in order to warrant that concept,

and that's where the work of Alan Cocconi came in.

Now, you built the... the prototype for this in... in your garage?

Yes. Well, my garage isn't quite the average garage.

It's actually a pretty good machine shop

and electronics lab. But, yes, I built it there.

It's like a three-channel stereo amplifier.

It provides the right-size sine waves

and right frequency to drive the motor

for all the different driving conditions.

So it's a 100,000-watt stereo amplifier.

Alan's breakthrough power system helped create an electric car

unlike any that had ever been driven before.

They'd kept this car also a secret

and much better than any other Detroit secret,

'cause it was all developed out here in California.

So it... it truly was a surprise when it was introduced

to the Los Angeles Auto Show.

This is going to represent a great step forward for people

in terms of commuting to work, from work,

if you don't have to go more than 120 miles a day.

Other than the jokes that we made

about the wisdom of calling a vehicle the Impact,

um, it was very impressive. It was very high-tech

and it had an interesting premise,

that we've got this sort of Corvette-electric-type car,

two-seater, slick styling and all that,

and that we can make a business out of it.

It was interesting.

I... I had worked with the program manager who then called me and said,

"Would you like to be on the electric vehicle program?"

And I said, "That's fine. What do you want me to do?"

And he said very simply,

"Develop demand for electric vehicles worldwide."

And I said, "Do you have any instructions?"

And he took a blank piece of paper and shoved it in front of me and he said,

"No instructions. You go figure it out."

And so at that point I joined the program.

Uh, it got a lot of interest flowing in the industry,

uh, but it did something else.

It caught the attention of the California Air Resources Board.

California's Air Resources Board,

or CARB as it was known,

saw the electric car as an opportunity to solve another problem.

Since GM had already announced

that they were going to produce an electric vehicle

before we even adopted the mandate,

the electric vehicle technology became sort of the technology

of greatest promise.

Knowing a modern electric car was now possible,

California regulators took a bold and unprecedented step.

They passed the Zero Emissions Vehicle Mandate.

The mandate was simple.

If automakers wanted to continue to sell cars in California,

some of those cars would have to be vehicles with no exhaust.

They decided they were gonna ramp it up.

We're going to say 2% in '98,

we're gonna say 5% in 2001 and 10% in 2003.

For the car companies, there were only two options,

comply with the law or fight it.

In the end, they would do both.

The electric car is here.

The EV1 from General Motors.

The Impact prototype became the EV1,

the first modern electric production car

from a major US car company in nearly a century.

GM chose its Saturn division to market it in California and Arizona.

I bought my first Saturn at 17 and they said,

"Do you want to come work here?"

So I thought, okay. It would be a good college job.

I'll put myself through college this way.

And turned out I loved the cars more

than I loved... what I was studying in college,

and three years later they announced

the EV1 program, and I jumped on it.

There were the 13 of us, most of whom were mid-20s, unattached,

single, no kids, willing to do anything for little money.

We all handled a particular geographic region.

Mine started as LA, and... and I worked with everybody

from engineers and students to celebrities.

I have a picture of myself

just hearing the Saturn song and just being so happy.

I had one of those early EV1s,

and I used it here in the capital.

I loved the car.

It's sort of like everything Americans want in a car.

They're cool, they're fast, they're sexy.

I mean, I got in the car and I felt like...

It was fairly reasonably priced.

It was between $250 and $500 a month.

I haven't tried accelerating too much,

because there're too many cops around.

I'm afraid I'll get a ticket. I'll be too excited.

Believe it or not, that sucker goes.

It will take you down the PCH so fast you could get a ticket.

I did kind of feel like Batman, you know, that sort of, like...

And the way it takes off out of the cave.

You know, I have this gate that opens and it goes...

You get inside,

and the console is really near you

and the lighting is beautiful.