The wonderful thing about Netflix is that you can slowly but surely catch up on all those movies that you have wanted to see but always forget about or can never find. Last week I got to see A Day without a Mexican, and this week we watched the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car. Mariana told me this was a good movie, but I didn’t know it would make me so angry.
First of all for some reason I thought this movie was made in the late 90s, but No, It was made in 2006, so everything they were talking about happened within the last few years. GM, through their Saturn devision had made a series of totally electric cars and had leased them to people in California. Apparently it was really hard to get one of these in the first place. Mel Gibson had to go through this whole big rigamorole to get his. Then after a few years GM said Oh there is no demand for them (when really there were waiting lists for them) and they shut down the program and bought the company that made Hummers instead. Really GM??? Really?
The whole time that we were watching this movie Mario and I just kept saying to ourselves, But why? Why in this day and age wouldn’t a company want to be on the cutting edge? Why wouldn’t they want to offer consumers one more option? Why were they being such Assholes! One of the most amazing things to me was that when people wanted to renew thier leases they wouldn’t let them. (because clearly that is not demand). Then the other thing that dumbfounded me, was that instead of taking these cars apart and recycling like they had said they would, they were either crushed or SHREDDED…. yes they had a batch of these cars, in perfectly good condition SHREDDED. I was speechless.
I would highly recomend watching this movie.
Mario and I have been interested in the idea of an all electric car, and there are a few on the horizon that are going to totally kick ass when they come out, the Tesla Roadster for one, but as they are going to be new fancy cars they are also initially going to be really pricey. Mario, being the wonderfully investigative mind that he is, was looking around the interweb one day and found out that you can actually convert existing cars to all electric. They even have a kit built especially for his porshe. After seeing this movie we realized that if we want the electric car revolution to gain momentum, then we have to help out and become a part of it. Instead of buying a new gas car, maybe mario will invest a little more upfront and convert the porshe to an electric car. Sure it means a little extra upfront, but then what you don’t have to repair, the regular maintenance that you don’t have to have, and the fact that you are no longer polluting more than makes up for it.
As with anything, there are limitations. many electric motors have a limited range. However, you plug your car in at home at night (or into an outlet anywhere) and there you go filling up your “tank”. One of the ladies in the film talked about, if you told someone 30 years ago that you would have phones that you would take with you everywhere, but you would have to plug them in after using them for a few hours they would have looked at you crazy. But look at us, more people get cellphones than land lines today. I think its the same thing with the electric cars. according to some figures in the movie, the average american drives 29 miles a day. If you have a car that goes 50 miles on a full charge, then you are good to go. Mario drives about 50 miles a day to work and back. If he had a car that went at least 75-100 miles to the daily charge he would be all sorts of set. It would assure that he would get to work and back and would allow for any extra little trips that he wanted to make. AND if he could plug in at work, oh my goodness he would be all set.
I am very excited that we are going to be getting serious about this. We always talk about wanting to do things like get solar panels, and so on and so forth, but its not until we map out the steps that need to be taken that we actually start taking action (good that we are both like this, bad that we are both like this, we work well together, but we both have the same weaknesses). My goal is to get a cool little vintage car, like one of the smaller dodge darts, the swinger I think it is, and convert it to electric. How awsome would that be to know that you are driving this kick ass vintage car and not polluting.
