Zub Tales

Woke up this morning and remembered what I was going to post about on Sunday but forgot…

I saw the Who Killed The Electric Car documentary on Friday night. I’d seen the trailer and wanted to check it out earlier in the summer, but it wasn’t playing in Toronto until now.

Um, wow.

It’s quite good and you’d be wise to check it out if it’s playing near you… or snag it when it comes out on DVD November 14th.

Fully electric-powered cars that emitted no exhaust fumes and ran fast, quiet and clean existed when I was heading to college in 1996. Ten years ago the technology was affordable and on the roads because of tough legislation in California forcing the car manufacturers to come up with alternatives to polluting vehicles – the same kind of legislation that forced the industry to comply with a whole ton of good things we now take for granted, like catalytic converters, seatbelts and airbags. The story of how that technology got buried and where the auto industry is headed now may seem pretty clear once you watch the trailer for the documentary, but there’s a bunch of other things they cover too. Check it out.

I grew up in Oshawa, a GM town. Almost everyone we knew worked at GM at some point or was friends with someone who did. Hell, the cheesy ‘Welcome to Oshawa’ sign says – ‘The city that moto-vates Canada’. My contempt for the auto industry as a whole and GM specifically is pretty pointed now. So many companies (and every political group in power) have a ‘short term profit at all costs’ mentality to please their stockholders and/or make messes for the next group in charge to worry about. Huge group mentality emitting this giant ‘not my problem’ signal. Quite sad.