Who Killed the Electric Car? Debate Rages On

At last week’s conference on plug-in electric vehicles and government policy in Washington, D.C., all of the stars from the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? were out. There was the feisty protagonist Chelsea Sexton, celebrity EV1 owners like Peter Horton and unexpected plug-in allies like former CIA director Jim Woolsey on hand. Also present was Toyota’s national manager of its advanced technology group, Bill Reinert, a strange “villain” of the movie. Within minutes of the exhibition hall’s opening Reinert was surrounded by members of Sexton’s advocacy group, Plug In America, rehashing the same discussion from the 2006 documentary.


GM suffered the brunt of the film’s ire for crushing the EV1 program, but the Plug In America reps took Reinert to task for the similar way Toyota went about disassembling its RAV4 EV program. Standing next to a converted plug-in Prius (Reinert is in the brown jacket), rough language and impassioned rhetoric was exchanged, with neither side conceding anything. Much of the argument boiled down to the perceived demand for fully electric vehicles: Reinert and Toyota contend that there isn’t a viable market; Plug In America says quite the opposite.

Reinert is a strange figure in the auto world. Known for speaking his mind, Reinert ticked off the limitations of plug-in electric cars during a panel discussion at the conference. Similarly, when Reinert appeared in Who Killed the Electric Car? he enumerated the limitations and feasibility issues that continue to plague fuel cell technology, which Toyota and many other car makers decided to pursue instead of fully electric cars. As head of Toyota’s advanced technology group, you’d hope he would have been more excited to talk about the potential of their “advanced technologies” rather than its shortcomings.

Still, the debate between Reinert and the plug-in advocates, some of whom still drive their RAV4 EVs, was far less productive than one would have hoped. While all the big automakers are now making moves toward manufacturing more fuel-efficient cars, we worry that the execs at the top, who drove us through the SUV boom, still don’t get it.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post