Link to trailer. Another thread made me think of this. This looks like an interesting documentary. The electric car was good to go - why did it disappear?
Big oil is in bed with the auto industry. They make/sell complementary products, and have successfully structured their markets into forming oligopolies. Together, they squelch innovation on new engine technologies and continue to push oil and gas-based internal combustion.
Well it would not be the first time. Beginning in 1916, "a coalition of rubber, trucking, steel, and paving companies, but most of all the automobile industry, worked government to transform America," writes researcher Mark Ledbetter. GM at the fore, this coalition worked to destroy the electric trolley transportation systems used by those people who couldn't afford Eor didn't want Ecar. After failing to convince the trolley companies to voluntarily switch to their fossil-fuel burning, rubber-tires rolling, steel-made buses, the coalition recruited "small-time bus operator" Roy Fitzgerald to buy up the smaller city trolley lines, and replace them with his buses, as the National City Lines. Most US electric trolley lines were torn up, paved over, and forgotten as national Good Roads were built for cars, and more polluting, less efficient buses became the normal public transportation. In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks were all found guilty of violating anti-trusts laws, in a conspiracy to kill off the trolleys. They were all fined US$5,000, and the various corporate heads were fined US$1 (one dollar) each. This wasn't even a slap on the wrist, much less a real message to cease their evil ways. http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id431/pg1/
Even anti mass transit Houston had those efficient trolley cars. The older I get the more I see wrong with capitalism and the more of a socialist pig I become.
and..... http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_335.html If you think trashing the LA trolleys was the extent of GM's alleged crimes, you ain't heard nothin' yet. In 1974 one Bradford Snell, a staff attorney for the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee, advanced the startling proposition that GM had (1) sabotaged energy-efficient electric transit systems in 45 cities around the country, including LA, in order to sell more fuel-guzzling buses and autos; (2) forced the railroads to replace nonpolluting electric locomotives with GM-built diesels by threatening to withhold lucrative auto shipments; and, most astonishing of all, (3) treasonously built armaments for the Nazis during World War II through Opel, its German subsidiary. Not surprisingly, Snell's charges were widely publicized. Snell lavished particular attention on the case of the Pacific Electric. Though it's difficult to believe today, Los Angeles once boasted the largest system of "interurbans" (heavy-duty inter-city trolleys) in the U.S., carrying some 80 million passengers a year in the late 1930s. According to Snell, all this went out the window starting in 1939, when GM got together with Standard Oil of California (now Chevron), Firestone, and other auto-related firms to set up a holding company that bought up trolley lines, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses. "The noisy, foul-smelling buses turned earlier patrons of the high-speed rail system away from public transit and, in effect, sold millions of private automobiles," Snell said. "Largely as a result, Los Angeles today is an ecological wasteland." In a stinging counterattack, GM argued that Snell's accusations were off the wall from start to finish. The company said it relinquished day-to-day control of Opel in 1939 following the German invasion of Poland, and severed all relations with the firm when Germany declared war on the U.S. in 1941. It denied trying to strong-arm the railroads, pointing out that an earlier government investigation into the matter had produced nothing. Finally, it said its investments in various transit holding companies were small, that it exercised no managerial control, that many of the PE lines the California holding company bought had already been converted to buses, and that in any case the conversion to buses was part of a nationwide trend that was well under way before GM had made any transit investments at all. Now, you may or may not believe GM's professions of innocence concerning the holding company. But most authorities agree that trolleys bit the dust in LA and elsewhere not because of a conspiracy but because they were slow and inconvenient compared to autos, and in the long run just couldn't compete. Los Angeles is typical in this respect. It has neither the high population density nor the concentrated downtown necessary to support rail transit. The PE, which was owned by the Southern Pacific railroad, made a profit in only 8 of the 42 years it was in business under its own name. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that many PE lines in LA proper operated on city streets, and as more cars crowded those streets, service got progressively slower. (The average speed on the run to Santa Monica was only 13 MPH.) Buses were looked on as the transit industry's salvation because they were cheaper to operate and maintain than trolleys, with no tracks or wires. In fact, the PE had begun to convert to buses in 1917, and had changed over 35 percent of its system by 1939. A state commission in the late 30s urged that busification continue, and by the early 1950s most of the tracks were gone. The last line gave up the ghost in 1961. It's too bad--some think the PE could have been the nucleus of a decent, if heavily subsidized, modern rail system--but blaming GM is like blaming the inventor of gunpowder for war.
Want to know something? When I was a little kid, like in 1978. The people down the street from us. They had an electric car. It was pretty cool. Then one time the car exploded and everyone on the block ran down there to see what happened. The Firemen were there and it smelled really bad. It left a pile of ashes in their driveway. The car was blue and had a Ziggy sticker on it.
electric cars are overrated. In the end, they still use oil. Also, electric cars can't push past something like 30 mph's.
Everyone knows who killed the electric car it was the Stone Cutters! Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do! Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the martians under wraps? We do! We do! Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do! Who robs the cave fish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscars night? We do! We do!
Growing up, I frequently heard stories about Houston's trolley system from my Mom and Grandmother, who used the line that ran out into the Heights, and stories from many others. For a long time, you could see where the rails used to be. I don't know how evident they are today (I've lived in Austin the last 25 years), but everyone talked about how great they were back then, and how they missed them. It was a criminal conspiracy, and the public got the shaft. Keep D&D Civil.
All incorrect. The General Motors EV1 did not use oil (except in lubricant forms), and produced no emissions. Some mild modifications allowed it to reach speeds of 183MPH, though production vehicles were computer-limited to 80MPH. The Honda EV plus also had a max. speed of 80MPH. And all work on purely electric vehicles by major companies stopped (despite huge corporate welfare checks from the government) around 2002. Think of how far computers have come since 2002. Think of iPods and all that junk - it's probably incorrect to think similar advances couldn't have been made on these cars. And it's not unreasonable to ask why they were suddenly, with no obvious reason, abandoned (and most of them destroyed). The major issue was the distance they could travel on a single charge..generally between 70 and 140 MPH. Considering that there were no chargers available on the roads, this created a problem. But it's not like the technology never changed, never improved, etc., and there's no reason at all why those problems could be considered insurmountable, any more than there's a reason to believe that someone couldn't make a flat TV, or fit 40 gigs of information in a tiny hard drive. Cars like this would be perfect for driving in the city, commuting to work, etc., and they never got past their second generation of production - and the technological advances from 1996 first gen. cars to 2000 second gen. cars were already significant. How much have regular cars changed sinced the model T? Imagine what an electric car would be like after 10 or 20 years, if the research actually had significant support....
What would really get the oil companies' panties in a bunch would be the adoption of solar cars, then they couldn't even make money on the electricity production used to charge electric cars. Really, solar energy is the future, but no one wants to spend a bunch developing it because they can't charge you for the sun.
Silicon valley is ripe for a Solar revolution. It'd only take a few bold companies to change their chip production into mass producable solar cells... A Moore's law for solar cells?? Then again, China could get the jump on us since their command market allows the gov't to do whatever the heck they want relatively quickly.
Electric car smoking a Vette... Add a small gas generator (or a fuel cell if they are ever worth a crap) and you have a product that will interest more than eco-nerds.
Capitalism does not do some things well. The prime motivation of the next quarter's profits doesn't square with taking care of the environment. It also completely sucks at affordable health care. Heath insurance is not a rugged entrepeurial type of thing at all, (it was invented at least a hundred years ago and is a simple sharing the cost concept). It does not rquire the wasteful "overhead" of profit for big biz, marketing, billing and all the associated waste of private insurance.This approx 25% of "overhead" would insure all Americans with the same level of care now provided for the fortunate who now have insurance. We need to regulate very much in certain areas. This used to be understood. Then some of the rich started their war on government so that they could have their taxes lowered. among other taqtics like buying up a lot of mainstream media to host right wing talk and through pay for "research" studies supporting their ideology in right wing think tanks, they convinced much of the public (and of course the business school econ 101 types) that government regulation is inherently bad and inefficient.
Is Big Oil in bed with the Japanese auto industry? Right now domestic car sales are terrible but Japanese car sales are way up because of the price of gasoline. It sounds to me like Big Oil is sticking it to the American Car industry. In the past have big oil and the auto industries goals been the same? Sure and I'm sure there was some collusion. But I really doubt they are "in bed together" in some kind of consipiritorial way. Big Oil will do what's best for big oil regardless of the auto industry. If their goals happen to be similar, fine, but I don't think they work activily together. The reason electric cars didn't take off is because, at the time (and even today) oil is cheaper and gives WAY MORE bang for the buck than electricity. There is no better fuel with regard to energy storage than oil that can be easily produced today. I'm all for electric cars and I think the person who invents a cool little electric car that costs less than, say, 7 Grand for local errands (kids to school, grocery store, to the park 'n ride, blockbuster, etc...) will make a fortune. Americans will not soon give up their cars so the solution (IMO) is to let them keep their cars but provide them with something alternative for most of the piddly drives that we make.
