Electric cars mean more gas for all of us
Ruidoso News guest column
Ellen Wedum Cloudcroft
Article Launched: 09/18/2008 08:58:29 PM MDTI recently watched the documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car" again, and this time I took notes. GM, Honda and Toyota, among other manufacturers, all came out with electric cars in California in 1996-2006. Partly this was an experiment, partly it was because the California Air Resources Board (ARB) passed a mandate in 1990 that the manufacturers stock 10 percent zero-emission vehicles in their showrooms by 2003.
But the automobile industry never really committed to the electric car. They only leased the cars, they never sold them. The documentary was mostly about the GM EV1. After the first two years on the road, a reliable battery had been developed by Stan Ovshinsky.
This battery allowed the EV1 to travel 80 miles on one charge. The movie showed the driver pulling into the garage, going around the back, and pulling out an electric cord that they then plugged into the outlet on the wall.
Wow! So easy! The cost of the power was the equivalent of 60 cents a gallon. In the year 2000, when the EV1 was beginning to appear on the highways in California and Arizona, the price of gas was about $1.50 per gallon.
And the cars are so quiet! The movie showed the EV1 going out of a parking garage, I think mainly because there would be no noise otherwise (and we are used to noisy cars).
Now I believe gasoline-powered cars contribute to global warming, and not everyone agrees with that, but I think we all agree that they are the main cause of smog.
So especially in Southern California, the electric car would be a blessing, improving air quality and, indirectly, the health of millions of people. (In 1989, 25 percent of the 15-to-24-year-olds in Los Angeles had lung problems.)
But GM (and the other manufacturers) refused to increase production. At their peak they only produced four cars a day. One man related that he saw the EV1 in the showroom (it was only there because of the mandate) and told the salesperson, "I'll take it." He spent six weeks convincing them to lease him the car.
Any readers ever have to beg a dealer to sell, or lease, a car to them? What kind of sales technique is that? There was a small staff of young (and idealistic) salespeople out recruiting lessees, and there were 4,000 people on the waiting list. Mel Gibson wanted one, and the salesperson had to submit an application, with a resume, to GM to get them to lease him an EV1.
In 2001, GM closed the EV1 assembly line and laid off the salespeople (starting with the ones that had the longest waiting list). Then GM and Chrysler sued the state of California. And President Bush, an oilman to his toenails, threw $1.2 billion into developing a hydrogen car.
This was just a way of drawing attention away from the electric car. Why else start from scratch drawing plans for hydrogen cars, which are not zero emission, when you already have a workable electric car?
A new chairman of the California ARB then rescinded the zero emissions mandate on April 24, 2003. (How interesting that just a few months later he was appointed chair of a hydrogen fuel cell organization....)
As the leases expired, GM, Honda, Toyota etc recalled the cars and refused to renew the leases. They then had the cars shipped to wrecker yards (the main one was in Mesa, AZ). There the cars weren't just crushed, they were shredded into tiny scraps of metal. And GM began to aggressively market gas-guzzling SUVs.
So the oil companies, the auto manufacturers and even the Federal government conspired to kill the electric car. Texaco-Chevron bought the patent for Ovshinsky's battery (and buried it in a file).
If everyone who owns more than one car and lives in an urban area where they commute less than 20 or 30 miles to work had an EV1 as their second car, there would be so much more gas for the rest of us. But then the price of gas would be lower, wouldn't it? And the oil companies don't like that idea one bit. Remember, big business has NO 'family values.' They are all about making the most money they can.
I was in Aztec, attending a meeting of the interim Water and Natural Resources committee, and ended up at a dinner sitting next to a lobbyist for the oil industry, taking part in the general conversation, and when I mentioned that I would really like to have an electric car, the lobbyist stopped talking to me. Guess I won't be getting $200,000 in campaign funds from the oil people, like Dennis Kintigh, the Republican who defeated Dan Foley in the HD 57 Republican primary.
Because we are burning gas, the oil PACs have money to burn on contributions to the candidates that will give them what they want, which is a monopoly on our pocketbooks. And which presidential candidate is getting lots of money from Big Oil?
Ellen Wedum is a Democratic candidate for the NM House of Representatives, District 59.