A 3-year-old circles her parents’ first new car ever, a Chrysler 300, white with black interior. “My car … my car … my car,” she chants, hand never breaking the connection with the smooth paint job.
Thirteen years later, the incantation took. And there was nothing as exciting for that teenager as knowing on any given Denver onramp that hulking ride would do its sweet imitation of entering hyperspace. Pedal down, the car would inhale then whoosh.
Freedom. (Horse)power. Escape. Our cars, ourselves. Surely this is the sort of auto erotic riff, the kind of car lust, the maker of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” would disdain.
After all, how could the director of a documentary that makes you think thrice about the car in your garage stomach this too rosy memory of a Detroit-born, gas-gulping, CO2-spewing beast?
Yet, director Chris Paine and Chelsea Sexton, the movie’s bright, breakout star, know car ardor. And that’s one reason “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which opened Friday, is a complex joy ride more than a sulky funeral procession.
Admittedly Paine’s own car love has been tainted since embarking on the tale of the short life and disquieting death of the General Motors EV1 and a small fleet of all-electric vehicles automakers leased in California in response to a state mandate.
“When I first came to L.A, I had a ’66 Mustang,” he said. “I thought it was pretty cool. It still is. But this has forever corrupted how I think about the subject. I can’t see any car without thinking about what specific damage that car is doing to this place in which we all live.”
As aggravating a picture as Paine paints about the lack of will – corporate, political, consumer, even – when it comes to changing America’s reliance on fossil fuel, he never stoops to conquer by scolding.
“Everyone always expects us to hate the Hummer, to say it should be taken off the market,” Sexton said over breakfast one morning. She and Paine were in Denver for a preview screening. “For me to suggest what other people should drive would be arrogant and hypocritical. Whatever my personal feelings about the Hummer, I’d never say you’re not allowed to drive it.”
Which doesn’t mean she won’t try to sway you. The California native was one of the first sales specialists GM hired to work on its sleek two-seater.
GM, as well as Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Ford, manufactured electric-only vehicles in response to a 1990 California Air Resources Board ruling that mandated automakers deliver a certain percentage of zero-emission-vehicles, or ZEVs, into the state’s marketplace over time.
Since Saturn had experience marketing a new car, GM chose the Tennessee-based division to work on the EV1.
“It was kind of surreal to drive the car for the first time in Spring Hill, Tenn., where there are nothing but rolling hills and highways,” Sexton recalled.
“The first time we got in one, we were like ‘Omigod, this is going to change the world.’ We felt so fortunate to be there. It was such an easy car to fall in love with.”
Laid off in 2001, when GM pulled its already ambivalent support for the EV1, Sexton never got to sell them, only lease them to Californians like Peter Horton (“thirtysomething”).
“I’ve never had a product I had to beg, borrow and fight to get. Then fight to keep,” Horton says on screen.
Sexton arrives at Horton’s place as he watches his EV1 being towed away. Horton was the last of the California lessees to relinquish his car.
Executive director of Plug In America, an advocacy group for electric vehicles, Sexton also works in the alternative fuel division for zag.com. The start-up intends to help consumers find the right car without relying on the wrong car-lot jockey.
Sexton tells of a call from another of her lessees who had named his EV1 “Sparky.” “Whenever I’d call his house, he’d tell his little boys, ‘Sparky’s mom is on the phone.’
“I came home to this message. ‘Hi, they took Sparky away today.” She lowers her voice to imitate the Eeyore the EV1 lessees seemed to turn into. “You’re the only one I could think to call.”
