The director of Who Killed the Electric Car on his new film and why he thinks EVs are ready to rise

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/who-killed-electric-car-chris-paine

The Electric Car Strikes Back?

The director of Who Killed the Electric Car? on his new film, his personal fleet, and why he thinks EVs are ready to rise from the dead.

— By Kiera Butler

Mon May. 2, 2011 2:30 AM PDT

Back in 2006, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? revealed how various industry players—including petroleum companies and car manufacturers themselves—conspired to sabotage the launch of the first electric vehicles. But shortly after the film was released, its director, Chris Paine, began to hear rumblings of an electric car comeback. "I started an email correspondence with GM," recalls Paine. "I said, 'we thought you had a great car and we were upset that you killed it. But if you're going to do it right, I'm going to tell the story, since it's not often that companies change their minds on big decisions like that.'" Sure enough, a few years later the next wave of electric cars have hit the market—and Paine's sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, tells the story of what happened. I spoke to Paine shortly after his film's Earth Day premiere.

<snip>

CP: I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view.

<snip>

MJ: What's your next project?

CP: We just launched it—it's called CounterSpill. We're taking on the biggest non-renewable energy disasters in the world and keeping them on the front page rather than buried in the news cycle or the corporate spin cycle. Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost. We want to point out that solar, for example—which has typically been thought of as so expensive—is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.