The Lantern

Issue date: 10/4/07 Section: Campus

After watching a documentary about the "murder" of the electric car, Ohio State senior Spencer Maney was distraught.

"It's just like - what the hell?" the philosophy major said. "This car works, and now it's just not being produced. It seemed like they just wanted to cover it up, you know?"

The documentary that troubled Maney, "Who Killed the Electric Car?," was screened Monday in Hagerty Hall as part of the Ohio Union Activities Board Alternative Movie Series. The film chronicled the last days of the General Motors EV1, the first electric automobile built in the 1990s that was manufactured by an American car company.

"I think this documentary will cause students to think critically about important issues facing our society and will inspire them to become more interested and engaged in these topics," said Haroon Iqbal, the visual and fine arts chair for OUAB.

OSU electrical and computer engineering professor Ali Keyhani believes the practicality of the electric car on a mass scale might be easier said than done. "The electrical car failed because of a lack of energy density in storage devices, inadequate charging capacity, and the weight associated with current available lead-acid batteries," he said.

In the documentary, filmmaker and grassroots activist Chris Paine captured public protests against the destruction of the EV1 and even flew a helicopter over an isolated area in an Arizona desert, where hundreds of cars were being broken down for scrap metal, far from media attention.

In addition to interview clips from EV1 owners, including familiar faces such as Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks, Paine interviewed politicians, engineers and various energy specialists, all of whom have their own opinion about who really killed the electric car.

While the film profiles all the suspects who might have had a hand in the EV1's demise, the question of the real culprit's identity is left to the audience to answer. Many viewers, however, might decide that a likely culprit is General Motors, which backed away from a promising product for all too common reasons - greed and fear.

According to the film, the grip of the oil industry on the public and the profits being rendered from this control was enough reason to convince the government, policy-makers and GM executives to take the EV1 off the market.

"I just found it ridiculous that we were going towards something that could be so great on all aspects, and just for some reason we don't have that anymore," Maney said.

Keyhani said the future lies in another cleaner alternative: fuel-cell cars.

"Fuel-cell cars, whose main input is hydrogen, can be produced from natural gas, and its output is direct current (DC) power, the same as battery power," Keyhani said. "The pollution from fuel-cell cars is negligible, and only clean water is discharged from tail pipes."

Keyhani added that "if the (hydrogen) fuel cell can be developed in a price range that can be used for transportation, it can also be used to power our homes. The same way we have air conditioning equipment outside of our homes, we will have fuel-cell equipment outside of our homes that are connected to natural gas."

pineiro.3@osu.edu

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