Buck In Brief

A Look Back at Electric Cars

In Brief: Did Detroit kill the electric car? Bill Curtiss explains.

03/21/07

A note from Buck: Back in the 90's, Earthjustice investigated the Big Three automakers to see if they unlawfully avoided producing electric cars. Deputy Director Bill Curtiss explains.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about Chris Paine's film, "Who Killed the Electric Car?", which highlighted the role that Earthjustice played in the story that is the film's subject. As its title suggests, the documentary is about the fate of the all-electric (not hybrid) car, which was thought by many in the 1990s to represent the future of the automobile. In those days, the concern centered around the damage to public health from air pollution; today, the concerns also include the need to reduce the largest single source of the greenhouse gas emissions that are slowly cooking our planet.

In 1995, Earthjustice was approached to help analyze and present evidence suggesting that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler had colluded to avoid producing electric cars as required by a 1990 California Air Resources Board regulation. The regulation was adopted to reduce tailpipe air pollution, and it required that auto manufacturers would have to offer "zero emissions" (which in practical terms meant electric) cars starting in the 1998 model year. Two percent of the fleet sold in California in 1998 would have to be electric, with the fraction rising to ten percent by 2003. CARB understood that the regulation would require car makers to develop and implement new technology. But with the production requirement eight long years off, Detroit was willing to play along -- GM had just introduced the electric Impact concept vehicle at the Los Angeles auto show with much hoopla and was suggesting the car could be on sale as early as 1995.

Earthjustice was interested in the project because the CARB regulation was rumored to be in trouble by 1995, even though the agency had reaffirmed the schedule the year before. By that point, both Detroit and the oil industry were publicly gunning to overturn the electric car requirement. We thought that if GM, Ford and Chrysler had in fact ganged up to prevent competition among themselves in the post-1998 market for electric cars in California, and to prevent electric vehicles from competing with their conventional petroleum-powered products, then there might be a violation of federal anti-trust laws involved. Perhaps we might convince the U.S. Department of Justice, having sufficient resources and law enforcement muscle, to investigate. And perhaps the Air Resources Board would want to think carefully about the possibility that it was being manipulated to protect Detroit's financial interests at the expense of consumers and public health. We knew the odds against us were long, but it seemed a gamble worth taking.

What we found suggested that the car companies were working together to make sure that there would be no electric cars produced that might threaten the existing market for internal combustion vehicles in California or in the twelve northeastern states that were also considering a similar mandate. Taxpayer-funded research into new battery technology was carefully steered by the Big Three away from designs that could be produced by 1998 and directed instead toward over-the-horizon alternatives that would remain safely unavailable for years. Detroit then made deals with innovative battery developers that prevented them from going public with the capability and evolving development of new batteries. As time passed and 1998 drew nearer, confident pronouncements of technological success and imminent prototypes from the Big Three gave way to public misgivings about consumer acceptance and doubts about the performance of its own yet-to-be-introduced products. Projected prices for electric cars climbed as car company accountants piled on new expenses (the sticker on Chrysler's minivan eventually wound up at $120,000). Detroit started hinting that it would produce cleaner conventional cars nationwide if California's electric car mandate were scrapped. Alarmed by consumer surveys showing that the public was receptive to electric cars, the American Automobile Manufacturers' Association sought help in creating a fake "grassroots" campaign supporting repeal of the mandate.

Earthjustice met with the Justice Department's Antitrust Division in Washington to present what we had found. DOJ was interested enough to start a quiet investigation of its own, but it gave up before long. And as it turned out, the CARB was undeterred from relaxing the mandate by the possibility that it had been hoodwinked. The mandate was replaced in March of 1996 by a set of agreements with car companies under which GM, Toyota and Honda eventually produced fewer than 2,000 electric cars prior to 2003 and then stopped; Ford and Chrysler never sold an electric car.

From time to time, researchers like Chris Paine and Jack Doyle (Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution, which looks at Detroit's struggle to avoid reducing auto emissions) have asked to see what we found. What such folks do with the information is up to them, but seeing it out in public is good.

So despite our efforts, Detroit won. Or did it? GM's Rick Waggoner was in Washington last week to oppose legislation requiring better auto fuel economy. To give you some context, new U.S. cars and trucks had an average fuel economy of nearly 26 miles per gallon in 1987; by 2004, the average had sunk to 24.4 miles per gallon. While pointing the finger at petroleum and too much driving as the reason for climate change and increased oil imports, Waggoner repeated GM's non-existent "commitment" to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, offered glimpses of promising but still-unavailable developments in battery technology, and asked for more federally subsidized research on batteries, fuel cells and hydrogen fuels. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, Toyota and Honda sold more than 200,000 hybrids in 2005 using the same American battery engineering from the 1990s that Detroit wasn't interested in. And Toyota announced last summer that a plug-in hybrid is on the way as well. If Detroit is winning, I wonder what losing looks like.

My thanks to Bill for for sharing his thoughts this month. As always, feel free to contact me with your views.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org