The other thing I was thinking about writing about last night was Who Killed the Electric Car?. It’s a very depressing film in some ways, but very inspiring in others. My two favorite people from the film were Chelsea Sexton and Stan Ovshinsky. Stan is an inventor, some of whose technology was used in the EV1 batteries, and Chelsea was an EV1 specialist at GM and is now the executive director of Plug In America. Stan amazed me because he’s just been inventing stuff for ages, since the 1970s, and he’s still going strong. And Chelsea I liked because she was so enthusiastic and she didn’t let the destruction of the EV1s (and other EVs like RAV4 EVs!) stop her from getting involved with later efforts in electric vehicles.

But it is tremendously depressing that the electric car, instead of being part of the present, is a part of history. And it’s depressing, if not surprising, that the oil and car companies resisted making it viable and acted as if it wasn’t viable even when it appeared to be, and even more disappointing that California and the federal government let them get away with it. They skipped the viable electric technology in favor of investing in the boondoggle of hydrogen, which still isn’t remotely commercially viable. It’s astounding that a government can be so disingeneous as to say “Well, this technology that works, even though it has limitations, that’s totally impractical, whereas this technology that’s even more expensive and works even less well and can’t be marketed commercially, we’re going to invest in that.”

VTA recently outfitted a hydrogen fuel-cell bus. Do you know how much it costs to run?

The most glaring figure: Zero-emission buses – or ZEBs – cost $51.66 to fuel, maintain and operate per mile compared with just $1.61 for a 40-foot conventional diesel coach. They break down much more frequently, and replacement parts are next to impossible to order, according to the report.

CARB (the California Air Resources Board, the same board that killed the ZEV mandate in 2003) is still saying that they have no intention of changing their position on fuel-cells. Why, given the prohibitive cost? The little research I just did looking for electric operation costs yields estimates for electric operations that, while still more expensive, are not over 30 times as expensive, more in the range of 2-5 times.

To be critical, though, I think the EV1 and electric vehicles in general aren’t as much of a panacea as the movie paints them. As is mentioned briefly, electricity comes from power plants, many of which are still coal-fired, and coal also isn’t clean and sustainable. However, it does at least come from here, and not a politically unstable part of the world. And we have the option of switching to cleaner ways of running our power plants on our own initiative.

Staying with cars as a transportation device also doesn’t address what they do to land use, with more roads and more parking being a constant demand and eviscerating density in cities, or the dangers of speeding around in a 2000lb vehicle.

But still, I’d rather be in traffic with EVs than with today’s vehicles. And it looks like it still might happen…