Figure I should just post some good videos I’ve watched recently.
Why We Fight is phenomenal. It really makes you angry, or at least should raise some questions if your pro-war. Below is the trailer:
Somebody put the entire movie up in multiple segments on youtube. You can find it here.
Who Killed The Electric Car? is also a very interesting documentary. It definitely raises some questions about why we aren’t farther along then we should be as it relates to more sustainable transportation. Trailer below:
And the best way to get a hold of both of these movies is…
1. Check them out from your local library
2. Get them from Redbox for free (I can walk to the one at Cub down the street from my house. But you have to return them by 9pm the next night). Free Codes Here.
as a documentary junkie why we fight is definitely one of my favorites. i’ll have to check out that other one as well. thanks for sharing.
I want to see these. I want an electric car. Its so unfair.
Re: the Redbox codes. The one that comes out every Monday always works but the others are spotty. We’ve made Mon. family movie night.
Who Killed .. is probably the most fictitious film since Goebbles’ Nazi documentary about Jews during the 1930s. You’d think an adult could figure out why electric cars have been collossal flops since 1907, when the Detroit Eelectric car debuted. Of course, the fact that the General Motors EV-1 was inferior to both the Toyota Rav4 Electric and Honda EV electric (two cars that were killed, but never mentioned in the film, which presents the fantasy history that only GM built a modern electric) is of no relevance in Paine’s implausible mind. Let’s see now, a $43,000 car that couldn’t guarantee a safe return from a destination a mere 35 miles away, that had a $20,000 plus battery pack of crappy NiMH cells that needed replacement every 5 years and took 8 hours to recharge : no emecy trips to the hospital while the car’s recharging, Dear. ‘Take the bus’ is Tom Hanks brilliant suggestion. A car that couldn’t take its owners on a trip of any distance and might, or might not make that claimed 80 mile range (it all depended , you see, on hilliness of terraine, AC usage, etc. etc.), a range that declined unpredictably as the batteries aged, making it quite a game of Russian roulette to figure out whether the old electric could still get back from the dentist’s office.
Yes, it’s a real Sherlock Holmes mystery as to why nobody wanted those electrics – GM never had more than 800 of its 1100 car fleet on lease at the same time. And, by the way, the car was not legal for sale and was only allowed on the highway by special dispensation with the Feds, who designated the EV-1 as an “experimental vehicle.” A vehicle,by the way, recently named one of the worst cars ever built by auto analysts at Time, Inc. Yeah, a real mystery why the EV-1 was cancelled.
I see that Chris Paine’s completely fictional piece of crap
took hours to try and figure it out. Of course, had he actually examined any of the 1001 deficiencies of the car, rather than trot out his paid shills to tell glowing stories about a car that couldn’t provide even the most elementary needs for its leasees, it might have taken sooner. Like 5 minutes : no practical and efficient battery, no practical and efficient electric car.
Gee,that didn’t take 7 minutes. But, of course, I’m nowhere near the liar that Chris Paine is. Or Tom Hanks or Ed Begley, who made the most remarkable claim ofall : that the ERV-1 could meet the needs of 90% of the public. Gee, I didn’t know there were that many people that could spare $50,000 for a
mostly useless second car, never needed to go on vacation, or even to any destination over 35 miles away, or make any emergency trips, and had an extra $20,000 for batteries every five years, making the car the most expensive ride on Planet Earth. I also didn’t know that 90% had a place to recharge an electric car. As I recall, the number is more like 70%. And, by the way, “Zero Emissions” in California doesn’t really mean zero emissions. California can’t make zero emission electricity and never will. California’s laws are as phoney as they are. And as fictional as their “documentaries.”
Anyone who is gullible or naiive enough to believe that silly piece of nonsense put out by the lying Chris Paine should be forced to drive an EV-1. They were pieces of crap. Only 50 out of 5,0000 GM customers who had expressed interest in an electric car followed thru an leased one. I was one of those interested. Until I found out about how expensive tghe car’s were, and how short the driving range was. I never understood why in the world GMever brought out the car in the first place. The film claims that GM was forced to do so by California’s Zero Emission Laws. That’s pure bunk. That law didn’t apply only to Gneral Motors, but to all two dozen automakers. GM had no more need to produce an electric car than any of the other 24 companies, although both Toyota and Honda built and leased (few could afford to buy an EV). The film is nothing more thn a sequence of transparent and rather implausible lies. You’d think adults would know what a car has to be able to do and be skeptical about the rather outrageously dumb claims made by the film. The EV-1 couldn’t do anything and I never came close to leasing the car. The car made no, repeat, no sense. It still doesn’t. If electric cars during the early 1990’s, with those terrible batteries,
were a brilliant new technology, why couldn’t it perform any of the functions required by a vehicle? Why didn’t all those 15 losing carmakers jump into this new technology and leapfrog the auto leaders? Paine’s ideas of the way a free market works are braindead. Any opportunity like he claims the electric are was, would have been seized upon by dozens of companies. His story is pure fantasy and chock full of really big lies. really big ones. I’m ashamed that the public is so gullible and , mostly, so damn stupid for beleiving this transparent hokum. You’d think they never saw an automobile or know anything about them. Remarkable. Simply remarkable. The Dumb and Dumber generation. That’s what I call it, and I’ve never been shown wrong yet. Remarkable. No wonder we can’t compete in the world.
I’m 84 years old, and was one of the early enthusiasts of the EV-1, when Popular Mechanics ran a story about this new
technology car that GM was building. That was around 1987.
The next thing I heard was several years later, when it was reported that GM was anticipating the production of a new “wonder battery” called a nickel metal hydride, for their electric car. I signed up as an “interested GM customer at my local Chevy dealer, hoping to be one of the first to get this limited production, experimental vehicle. The vehicle was never offered for sale, contrary to the movie’s claim that
GM refused to sell their cars but crusjhed them instead. Actually, that isn’t very true – GM sent many copies to the ngineering department of universities for study, sans their propritary components that competitors like Toyota and Honda would gladly pay big bucks to get a hold of and save millions in development costs. Soem of the sillier conspiracy theories floating around claim GM scuttled the cars so they couldn’t be driven. Legally, these cars couldn’t be driven on the highways in any event, except for the fact that no one enforces safety laws. I doubt that any insurance company would cover these cars. Especially those with lead acid batteries containing gallons of deadly sufuric acid that would be sprayed over the victims in the event of a crash.
Own one of these cars in an accident and you will be sued for all eternity. Anyway, when finally GM decided to lease the cars (after getting permission from the Feds, who allowed GM to build only a set small number of these illegal vehicles and promised to only lease the cars, so that GM could recover all of them once the “experiment” was over, I finally got to see the specs on the EV-1 and boy, was I appalled. To this day, I cannot understand why GM would think that anyone
would pay this much money to be this inconvenienced by an
automobile. Obviously these electric cars from Honda, GM and Toyota were being brought to market (actually all were leased
– no one with any sanity would have bought the things) to satisfypolitical pressures from the braindead California regulators and politicians, who held this fantasy belief that if they just passed a zero emissions law (a fraud -electric cars are anything but zero emission behicles) the automakers would “open up their technology vaults and produce a viable electric car.” Just to demonstrate their ignorance, any 7 year old knows the problem with mobile electric devices of any kind – “It’s the batteries, Stupid!” to paraphrase an old political slogan. And guess what? Automakers don’t make, design or invent batteries. Why would you think they would? At this point I lost all faith in anything any California politician said concerning alternative vehicles. So what
does California do, when it’s obvious that their zero emissions law, in dismissing far superior serial hybrids as
“non zero emission evhicles”, had a terribly damaging effect on any new electric car technology, like the Chevy Volt, a
car that can do everything that the EV-1 could not, at far less original cost and enormously less overall lifetime costs.
California screwed the environment by leading automakers into fairly useless fuel cell cars, that were claimed to use the
next ultimate energy source : hydrogen. We were to have a hydrogen economy. Now they’ve turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction and are opposed to fuel cell cars. Meanwhile GM and ten other automakers have spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing fuel cell cars. Aren’t we lucky that California can make a movie and shift all the blame
on companies people don’t like , like “Big Oil” ?