Revenge of the Electric Car?

Apr. 09, 2012

1:00 p.m.

It surfaces eventually in the documentary Revenge of the Electric Car (out on DVD). Director Chris Paine had put down a deposit on Tesla # 23long before the struggling start-up got its assembly line rolling. A stakeholder as well as a true believer, Paine constructed his recent history of the electric car as a three-act drama, complete with hard-to-surmount hurdles midway and a happy ending. Of course, the problem with this scheme is that the story hasn't ended and Paine's relentless optimism can seem a bit forced, just as the title of the film sounds premature at this point. The future of the automobile should be electric, but outside a few pockets of futurism, it's difficult to imagine how to keep an all-electric car running in a land without charging stations. Here in the provinces, who has ever seen a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf or even a GM Volt on the road? Oddly, Revenge of the Electric Car ignores the greatest alternative auto success story to date, Toyota's hybrid Prius, which actually has garnered public interest and market share. Not that Paine's three-act drama isn't interesting as well as entertaining. He identifies a quartet of protagonists in the struggle against gasoline-fired cars and follows their ups, downs and ups. They are an unlikely combination. Tough yet affable Bob Lutz, who suggests a character from “The Sopranos,” killed GM's earlier experiment in electricity only to push the Volt's development in a nod to his legacy. For the hawk-eyed plutocrat Carlos Ghosn, Nissan's CEO, the Leaf is either the ultimate high-stakes gamble or a shrewd application of The Art of War. Tesla's visionary Elon Musk had a hard time getting the nuts and bolts down, and with his $100,000 roadster, seems to view the average car owner as an abstraction. Greg “Gadget” Abbott is the everyman everyone can root fora backyard inventor who customizes existing cars into electric ones. Abbott's cottage industry iteration is the greenest concept of them all. Imagine driving a recycled Mercedes running on batteries. The commentary by Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neil is one of Revenge's throughlines. He loves the power and thrill of fast cars but foresees the inevitability of the electric, given the price and politics of oil (not to mention the environmental cost). And yet politics and the prospect of milking profits from the Earth may well delay the inevitable. The stake of Big Oil in maintaining the status quo receives barely a mention in Revenge of the Electric Car.