Feb. 26, 2005 EV vigil participants offer a symbolic check representing 100 who offered to pay the $24,000 for each of the remaining 77 EV1 cars. See how many people you can recognize from the movie. Click here to see the web postings by the activists and others who participated in the vigil to save the EV1. You have to scroll quite a ways down the page before seeing the postings.
It is hard for me to believe that the people that I followed over the Internet protesting the crushing of the EV1 by holding vigil out side a GM facility in Burbank, California are now in a major motion picture documentary being distributed across the country by Sony Pictures Classics, titled Who Killed the Electric Car. The person most prominent in my mind is Doug Korthof who appears several times in the film. He not only participated in the vigil but set up a website that I believe was a way to chronicle each day’s events, provide a place for those involved in the vigil to get information about vigil activities and to communicate with each other. I don’t think he ever thought that this vigil would touch the life of someone as far away as Virginia, but it did. I could not physically participate in the vigil in Burbank, but I was there every day reading what was happening at the vigil on the website. Their heroic efforts awakened in me an activist that I didn’t know existed.
Prior to the vigil my understanding of the technology and the market was just an intellectual exercise. I had discovered hydrogen years before George Bush and followed the arch of its feasibility. I remember getting very excited about the first lab reports of photon exchange membrane (fuel cell) successes and thinking hydrogen could be the future if produced using renewable energy from water through electrolysis. Then putting H2 up against the rigors of the marketplace and its barriers to entry, I came to the conclusion that hydrogen would be years away if ever a viable option. I looked at natural gas, ethanol, electricity and combinations and concluded that electric vehicles would be the least costly to consumers of all of the choices and therefore would enter and hold in the marketplace. I also concluded that hybrids, which use electricity and gasoline and have no real barriers to entry, would be the first alternative vehicle that would enter and take hold in the market place. Later, I thought, when batteries, controllers and efficiency improved, making long distance EVs producible, automobile manufacturers would drop the hybrids for pure EVs because they would be cheaper to manufacture.
I have always been an electric vehicle and alternative fuel enthusiast, following every change in the industry, researching its history, looking for kinks in the armor of the market for a way to get these vehicles into peoples hands. Then one day, it seemed to come true. General Motor’s said it was to produce an electric car following its successful entry into the World Solar Challenge and the hoopla that was raised by the press for its presentation of the Impact, the EV1 prototype.
I remember thinking that GM, had just leapfrogged the entire hybrid transition period with the EV1. I set aside money for an EV1, making myself ready to purchase the vehicle as soon as it would become available in Virginia. I waited for the new cleaner world being ushered in by the best of GM.
Then I remember feeling upset because GM was going to limit the EV1s distribution to California and Arizona. I calmed myself by telling myself not to worry. “The era of the electric car is here, I only have to wait. It will be in Virginia soon enough.” That day never came. The car was never released outside of California, and Arizona.
As a way for GM to add insult to my injury of never being given an opportunity to purchase the cars, GM decided that my demand and the demand of thousands of others who live near me, and the demand of people just like me waiting for the vehicles across the country was just not important. Rather than selling the vehicles across the country and making it a viable product, they opted to gather up all of the EV1s and crush them. Nothing that GM said about the demand for the vehicle was true. There had been news reports of dealerships facing demonstrations of spontaneous anger from customers who were frustrated by being denied access to the vehicles for which they were waiting. Chelsea Sexton had compiled a list of potential buyers that was approximately 5,000 people long. The idea of GM taking back the vehicles and crushing them was a terrible sign and not unprecedented in American automotive history.
Chrysler had destroyed all its turbine cars and quite successfully erased them from history. GE hid its electric prototype from public view after coming to some agreement with the auto industry not to produce it. There were many examples of the auto industry buying, destroying, hiding or using political influence to scuttle the entry of technological advancements. Remember the movie Tucker, about a man who tried to usher in a vehicle with seat belts, pop-out safety glass, fuel injection and lights that turned as the front wheels do for greater safety? Only to be crushed by the big industry and its political lackeys. Things such as seatbelts we take for granted now, fuel injection is in every new car and Lexus has just introduced headlamps that turn with the wheels for greater safety, a mere half a century after Tucker had. My original fear was that GM was planning a complete erasure of the EV1 such as Chrysler did with its turbine vehicles. I found my passions about these things coming to the forefront of my emotions. I was outraged. So I did the only thing I could do at the time. I joined the EV1 vigil, if not physically, in spirit and on the net. GM’s horrible decision gave birth to my activism on the 11th day of the vigil. It began with a simple plea to GM not to erase the EV1 from history.
Cross Posted From EVWorld