On the Soapbox

This is a follow-up to a post that I made back in July.

As I wrote in July and as I will write now, I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. As a result, I approached the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? with a fair amount of skepticism, but since I had not seen the film when I first wrote about it in July, I held back on passing judgment. Well, I finally got a chance to watch it last night...

1. This film takes a surprisingly balanced view in that, in addition to presenting its side of the story, it takes the time to explore and address a number of the counter-arguments as well.
2. The film seems to be more documentary in nature than some of the other politically-motivated "documentaries" in the sense that I did not get the feeling that it was frothing at the mouth with anger. It was fairly rational, and does not try to take the conspiracy too far (unlike Loose Change, which made a number of claims that bordered on the ridiculous).
3. Lingering objection: If electric cars were really that great, why did they not take off in environmentally-friendly countries? The film indicated that Toyota made electric vehicles, but they are not an American company. Why did they not introduce such vehicles in Japan? Japan's consumer base is more rational and adoring of new technology. They do not have a powerful oil industry, and their government, in certain respects, is less corrupt than ours. The same could be asked about Europe.
4. Lingering question: Is the film representative of EV1 drivers? Were most EV1 drivers really as satisfied as those portrayed or did these people represent a minority of those who tried out the EV1? I have no reason to suspect that the latter is the case, but I would be interested in knowing the answer to this.
5. Lingering objection: This still does not address the problem that our electrical infrastructure is in no way suited to handle the sort of strain that electrical vehicles would produce on a large scale. Granted, a hydrogen infrastructure would be even more costly, and the cost of upgrading the electrical infrastructure could easily be pushed off to the utilities who would stand to profit in the long run from this.

Overall, I think that the film is surprisingly good and presents the case without exhibiting much of a tin-foil-hat syndrome. Go watch it.