Chris Paine of Who Killed the Electric Car? on his new film, his personal fleet, and why he thinks EVs are ready to rise from the dead.
Source: Mother Jones
Back in 2006, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? revealed how various industry players—including petroleum companies and car manufacturers themselves—conspired to sabotage the launch of the first electric vehicles. But shortly after the film was released, its director, Chris Paine, began to hear rumblings of an electric car comeback. “I started an email correspondence with GM,” recalls Paine. “I said, ‘we thought you had a great car and we were upset that you killed it. But if you’re going to do it right, I’m going to tell the story, since it’s not often that companies change their minds on big decisions like that.'” Sure enough, a few years later the next wave of electric cars have hit the market—and Paine’s sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, tells the story of what happened. I spoke to Paine shortly after his film’s Earth Day premiere.
Mother Jones: What’s changed since Who Killed the Electric Car?
Chris Paine: There was a lot of blowback after the first programs were killed. Consumers were saying, ‘If we have to have cars, why are only bad cars available? Why do we have to rely on the Middle East?’ So the right and the left came around—afor security reasons and environmental reasons—and then the car industry itself, which realized no one was buying cars when gas hit $4 a gallon in 2008. And here we are in 2011, with gas prices going nowhere but up, and there is a serious international consensus that you have to have higher miles-per-gallon cars.
