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?

In 1996, General Motors (G.M.) launched the first modern-day commercially available electric car, the EV1. Many of the people who leased the car, including a number of celebrities, said the car drove like a dream. The car required no fuel and could be plugged in for recharging at home and at a number of so-called battery parks.

In the 1990, California regulators even launched a zero-emissions vehicle program to clean up the state’s smoggy skies.

However after producing slightly over 1,000 EV1s, G.M. scraped the project citing the reason as insufficient demand. Other major car makers also stopped the production.

There is suggestion that G.M., although has invested some $1 billion in EV1, fearing that EV1 would cannibalize its existing business, actually intentionally sabotaged their own marketing efforts in EV1 and killed the project.

In this lively and informative documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, writer/director Chris Paine showed how this unique vehicle came into being and why G.M. ended up reclaiming its own once-prized creation less than a decade later. In this documentary the hard science and complex politics, such a sCalifornia’s zero-emission Vehicle mandate have been translated into lay person’s terms.

Was it the companies, the oil industry, bad ad campaigns, consumer wariness, and a lack of commitment from the U.S. government who killed the electric cars?

But the movie ends on a hopeful note. We may never see the EV1 again, but vehicles using electric drive systems, either as full EVs (which are coming from several start-up companies) or plug-in hybrids, must inevitably roam the roads. The upward trend in gasoline prices, the effects of global warming, the inherent efficiency of electric drive trains, the continued improvement of battery technology, and the upcoming reevaluation of the ZEV Mandate guarantee it.

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