Back in 1996, GM started production on the EV1 Electric Car, and then 5 years later, at the height of the SUV craze cancelled it. In 2004, they started taking them back, dismantling them and crushing them. GM's reasoning? The EV1 wasn't profitable. After the millions in research and development spent on the vehicle, they decided there wasn't a market for this vehicle.
The first part of the movie tells the history of the EV1 through engineers, salespeople and drivers of the vehicle, and then halfway through turns the movie into a murder case, examining the suspects behind the destruction of the car. The movie is a lesson on how corporate decisions on marketing a product, government regulations and consumer decision processes interact.
At the end of the movie, we are left with a feeling of waste, and that we should all be running clean, electric vehicles instead of the gas-polluting cars that we drive today. It's also somewhat sad that GM (which is now in massive financial trouble) who was a pioneer in the field of electric vehicles essentially threw away the costs of research and development on the EV1 as well as a potential 10 year lead on the competition in the electric vehicle marketplace.
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