Vengeance is sweet

Paul Jenkin is a Ventura activist who saw the benefits and potential in electric vehicles a decade ago. But like every one of the nearly 5,000 people who leased electric cars, including Paul’s Ford Th!nk, he was unable to stop the recall of the lease of his car in 2006 for no other reason than “because.” He was not alone.

Because of these stories, filmmaker Chris Paine decided to make the film Who Killed the Electric Car?, telling the whole story of how oil, car, hydrogen and the U.S. government worked to destroy the first efforts to bring electric cars to the market. It was well-received at its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006.

But that was not enough for Paine. In 2007, he struck a deal with four groups of entrepreneurs to follow them in the quest to bring the electric car back to the world. Four years later, Revenge of the Electric Car debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on Earth Day 2011. The Ventura Film Society will present Revenge of the Electric Car on Tuesday, Feb. 21, at 420 E. Santa Clara St., 7:15 p.m., and it will be followed with a question-and-answer period with Paine. The Reporter spoke with the Los Angeles-based filmmaker about the past, present and challenges that the industry has faced.

Give us a recap of what your first film Who Killed the Electric Car? was about.
In the 1990s, California decided to go after pollution in the major cities where car traffic was going up and they were having trouble with childhood sickness, namely 25 percent of kids were showing up with asthma or lesions in their lungs and were breathing in too many toxins right off the roads and freeways near their schools. So [legislators] passed a law, which told car companies that they needed to start producing zero-emission vehicles. The best way to do that was with the electric car and by 1996-97, all the carmakers, almost every one, was leasing electric cars. A total of 5,000 were manufactured by GM and Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford — everybody had one to comply with this regulation.  
I had a GM EV-1. GM’s EV-1 really got this whole thing started because it developed here in Pasadena as a concept car, and when regulators saw this technology, they went, “We knew you guys could do it, now you have to do it.”  And as soon as this law went into effect, the car companies began fighting us from behind the scenes so when my car, which I absolutely loved and I didn’t expect to top — I bought it because Paul MacCready had helped design it and he was a childhood hero of mine, designing the Gossamer Albatross (a human-powered aircraft). [General Motors] wouldn’t renew the lease at the end of it and they started taking cars back and told us that the reason they were doing it was that nobody was interested in the cars, there was no market at all for electric cars. We knew that wasn’t the whole story so we made Who Killed the Electric Car?, which basically tells the story of the birth and death of these cars. They ended up crushing all of them by 2003. We came up with [several] suspects and sort of a Murder on the Orient Express kind of structure, and we find seven parties guilty of complicity in this, including consumer apathy, but the big enemies of the electric car were, of course, the oil industry and the auto industry, who were really working hard to shut this program down. So that was the film. I wanted to talk in that film about how innovation can get destroyed when too many vested interests are threatened. This is an example of the system not working because sometimes innovations like these are very important. It’s like, why should we have a monopoly of gasoline in the marketplace when there are lots of other ways to make cars run, and a lot of them are cleaner and domestically powered and even more fun to drive. The film came out in 2006 and created a stir.

A couple years later, we began Revenge of the Electric Car and we began to get all kinds of e-mails that said, “Hey, you know our company is actually starting to do electric cars again.” We said, “Really, really, you are?” And Tesla was probably the first company I became aware of because they’d been in the first film, and then we heard that General Motors might be getting back in the business, and because I had the contacts, our team said, “Well, let’s go inside.” We negotiated these, basically, secrecy agreements with them because the car companies were terrified that other companies would see this footage or, in the case of GM, they were in the process of going bankrupt, and then both Tesla and GM were having an IPO and so they didn’t have any editorial control of the film. We promised them we wouldn’t screen any footage until 2011. We filmed from 2008 until the end of 2011.

Let’s talk about the large car manufacturers. You show GM and Nissan. The amount of access that you had through their corporate structure was amazing.
We started covering Nissan last. We had started covering Mitsubishi but they closed us out. In fact, we approached a lot of companies who closed us out. It’s funny, the car companies would say, “We saw Who Killed the Electric Car? I don’t think you can come to our company and start shooting.”

With Nissan, our pitch was, “Listen, if you’re really doing an electric car, you guys will probably come off looking pretty good in this film.” And it all came down to the individuals. Carlos Ghosn [Nissan president] sent down a couple of people to interview my producer and I for the day. Then they flew him back to Japan, and a couple of days later he says, “OK, you can come over and film.” I think it was unprecedented, the access we had. Obviously, we weren’t going with him 24 hours, everywhere he went, but we did go to some pretty critical meetings and again, the nondisclosure was an important part of that.

Touch on the difference between GM and Nissan and the two different directions and strategies they had on what type of vehicle would be most practical at this point?
GM said the pure electric car is all well and good but the average American is not going to accept a limited range. They need to know their car is going to go 300 miles and fill up at the gas station because that’s what they’ve been doing for a hundred years here, so the electric car they were going to come to market with is going to be a hybrid.

 
It’s gonna leapfrog Toyota in the fact that you can plug it in and can run on electric. With the Volt, for the first 40 miles you can’t get the gasoline engine to turn on, it can only be electric, but after that 40 miles, gasoline kicks in and it’s a plug-in hybrid.

Nissan said, “Yeah, a plug-in hybrid is a good interim step for a lot of people but the real explosive market worldwide is going to be a pure plug-in.” When you have just a battery electric car, you don’t have to carry around an engine with you so you have a vehicle where you can put more money into the batteries and a car that is truly a zero emission. That works for a lot more planning criteria in cities that want to have cleaner vehicles.

Let’s talk about reusing what’s already here for the do-it-yourselfer. In the film, Greg “Gadget”Abbott retrofits old gas vehicles with batteries. Is there a large potential market out there?
At first, Gadget wasn’t going to be in the film. But when they had that disastrous fire [at his car garage], I realized this really represents a big part of the future in two ways: That electric cars don’t need anywhere near the service of a gasoline engine, and many mechanics can’t even service gas engines anymore because they’re so complex. Electric cars are simpler but there’s almost nothing to service. So what do you do with all this mechanical know-how? One great way to put these millions of people to work, potentially, in the next era is converting existing cars. You don’t build brand-new cars; you convert them into plug-in or pure electric cars. So we started to cover Gadget kind of with the idea that this is the everyman. The Iowa farmer is not going to work inside the system; he’s going to do it himself. To hell with the big guys. There’s a lot of obstacles you face when you do it yourself. I think that in the next 10 years, especially as gasoline prices go up, more and more people will be doing this and it will be a real growth business.

There still are a lot of limitations. In your mind, which of these is most important: Extending battery life, faster battery recharging or creating more recharging stations?
The most important thing is for people to have the opportunity to have people drive these things. I’ve been arguing and debating and talking about the electric car for 10 years, and I now know that the more questions you have, the more debating there is, and nothing changes people like experience.

 
Is there a danger of the industry going backward or even away, as it did in 2006?
In 1996-2000, the program was just in California and Arizona to a certain extent, but it was not national. In fact, one of the reasons we made the first film was to let the people know in other places that these cars existed. This time it’s worldwide. It doesn’t mean that every city has them for sale right now but it’s much more widely available. I think you’re right, there’s going to be push back: gas prices drop, there’s resistance to new technology, the sales will drop. I think this year might be a little bit light. Then gas prices will go up and the technology will be better and Audi will introduce their electric car and the sales will go up. So this is like when we switched from horses to cars. It took years for even the first Prius; it took several years to really develop market share. I think it’s the same thing with them. I just hope our film helps inspire a lot of people who can afford to, to go check these cars out and consider them. I think these cars are worth a lot more than people are paying for them and they represent a tremendous amount of risk by the people who are bringing up the market

Did you ever envision that just five years after making your first film, that you would be making another film showing how quickly things have caught and surpassed the first efforts?
I was pretty shocked, really, at how fast it went. I didn’t really necessarily want to make another film about electric cars, but reducing fossil-fuel use is the number one issue of our time. There are water and a lot of issues going on, but this impacts us on so many levels: economic, security, environment. I said, “I can now make a very different kind of movie on the same subject, so let’s go for it.” But it was pretty surprising. It was a great moment.

 
As an activist, we have so many battles that you lose, so it’s nice to see the major car companies change their tune a little bit.