Red 1997 General Motors EV1 electric car plugged in and charging

Who Killed the Electric Car Turns 20. The Car It Mourned Was Born in the 80s.

July 26, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USAWe were with the Dance Party USA family in the studio every week while it played. The Golden Years! The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

Twenty years ago this summer, a documentary walked into theaters and accused an entire industry of murder.

Who Killed the Electric Car? opened on June 28, 2006, from Sony Pictures Classics, directed by Chris Paine and narrated by Martin Sheen. It asked why General Motors built a fast, clean, genuinely great electric car called the EV1, leased it to drivers who loved it, then took every one back and crushed most of them in the Arizona desert. The Hollywood Reporter marked the anniversary this week.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason this story is ours. That car was not a 90s idea. It started in 1987, with a solar racer crossing the Australian outback, and it got the green light from a GM chief executive in September 1988. The electric car this movie mourns was born in our decade.

What is Who Killed the Electric Car about?

It is a murder mystery where the victim is a car. Paine lines up suspects the way Agatha Christie lines up passengers, and the press kit says the quiet part right in the synopsis: “multiple suspects, each taking their turn with the knife.” Consumers, batteries, oil companies, carmakers, the California Air Resources Board, the federal government. Each one gets examined and each one gets a verdict. You can get the whole tone in about two and a half minutes: the original trailer is still up on the YouTube channel of Papercut Films, Chris Paine’s own production company.

Paine was not a neutral observer. He had one. His director’s statement opens with a line we love: “Here’s what happened: I fell in love with my car.” He leased an EV1 in 1997, meant it to be his second car, and within days it was his only car. “$3 to fill up on electricity and you charged it overnight.” When GM started taking the cars back, he considered keeping his by force. “I thought about stealing mine, but the prospect of a felony and legal fees gave me pause.” So he made this instead.

Sony Pictures Classics picked it up in November 2005, right before Sundance, and brought in Alex Gibney as a consulting producer off the back of his Enron film. It premiered at Sundance on January 23, 2006 and opened in theaters that June. Critics were with it: 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 105 reviews, a 70 on Metacritic. The Hollywood Reporter’s own review called it “highly charged [and] undeniably thought-provoking.” It made less than $2 million, which tells you it was never a hit. It just refused to go away.

What was the GM EV1?

GM’s production electric car, made available for consumer lease in December 1996 at $400 to $500 a month, starting with drivers in Southern California and Arizona.

Two details explain the whole fight. First, you could never buy one. All 660 first-generation cars went out “under a leasing agreement that explicitly prohibited purchase,” which meant GM never stopped owning them. A second generation added 457 more, some with nickel-metal hydride batteries good for 75 to 150 miles a charge.

Second, it was almost absurdly easy to live with. The press kit describes the routine service visit: top up the windshield washer fluid, rotate the tires. That is the entire list. No oil, no exhaust, no gas station, and brakes that barely wore out.

In April 2003 GM said it could no longer supply parts, announced it would not renew a single lease, and sent tow trucks after drivers who would not hand the cars over. The program was finished by the end of that year. By August 2004 every leased EV1 had been collected. About forty went to museums and universities. Most of the rest were sent to be crushed.

Where did the electric car actually come from? 1987

This is the part the anniversary coverage keeps skipping.

In November 1987, a car called the Sunraycer ran from Darwin to Adelaide in the World Solar Challenge. It was built by General Motors, AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft, designed by a team under Paul MacCready. It qualified fastest of all twenty-four entries at 109 km/h, led the entire race, and covered 1,867 miles at an average of 41.6 mph. It finished in 5.2 days and it won.

Then it kept going. In the words of the record on the Sunraycer, it “led directly to the creation of the GM Impact.” And the film’s own timeline puts a date on the moment: September 1988, GM chief executive Roger Smith agrees to fund a prototype for a practical consumer electric car, engineered by the same AeroVironment crew that had just won in Australia.

You can follow it through the people. Alec Brooks led the Sunraycer’s development in 1987 and then led the Impact, which the press kit calls “the forerunner of the EV1.” Alan Cocconi built the Sunraycer’s drive system, then designed and built the controller for the Impact. Same engineers, same shop, one straight line from a solar racer in the outback to a car GM would crush.

Roger Smith showed the Impact at the Los Angeles Auto Show in January 1990 and announced on April 18, 1990 that it would go into production, aiming at 25,000 a year. That September, California adopted the mandate that made it real: 2 percent zero-emission vehicles by 1998, 10 percent by 2003.

So the sequence runs 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996. The car everyone argues about started as a decision made while the decade was still going.

What does this have to do with the 80s?

More than the date on the calendar.

Think about what the decade told us a car was supposed to become. We had a talking, thinking car on television every week, and we took it completely seriously, because that was exactly how the future was supposed to arrive: fast, sleek, and smarter than the driver. The joke of the whole EV1 story is that while KITT was the fantasy, a real car with no engine noise and no tailpipe was actually being built, and that is the one that got destroyed.

September 1988 also lands right in the middle of our run. That was the stretch when we were taping Dance Party USA every week, arguing about records. Nobody in that studio had the faintest idea that a car company had just signed off on something people would still be angry about decades later. That is usually how it works. The decade you are living in does not announce which parts of it are going to matter.

And there is one more coincidence we cannot leave alone. Who Killed the Electric Car? opened on June 28, 2006. Exactly twenty years earlier, on June 28, 1986, Wham! played “The Final” at Wembley in front of 72,000 people and walked away at the top. Same date, two decades apart, two goodbyes. One of them we all watched. The other one happened in a desert with nobody looking.

Which 80s stars are in Who Killed the Electric Car?

A lot of them, and they are not there as talking heads. They are there because they owned the cars.

Alexandra Paul is the one who got arrested. She was Leigh in Christine in 1983, Becky in American Flyers in 1985, and Connie Swail in Dragnet in 1987, years before Baywatch made her famous to everyone else. She bought her first electric car in 1990, a converted VW Rabbit that managed 25 miles a charge, and by the EV1 she was getting 120. On March 15, 2005, she and fellow actress Colette Divine blockaded a transport truck in Burbank carrying the last EV1s to the crusher. The press kit describes the scene plainly: “Twenty Burbank policemen took two hours to end the peaceful standoff, and Alexandra and Colette were arrested.” A judge fined them, ordered community service, and then suggested they serve it at environmental and electric car nonprofits. That same year the ACLU of Southern California named her its Activist of the Year.

Peter Horton is in it too, best known as Gary Shepherd on thirtysomething, with St. Elsewhere, The White Shadow, Dallas and Eight Is Enough behind him. Mel Gibson appears as an EV driver, which is a genuinely strange sentence to type about the man from Mad Max. Phyllis Diller turns up for the best reason in the movie: to talk about the electric cars that were already running on American roads before 1920. Ralph Nader and Ed Begley Jr. appear as well, and Martin Sheen narrates the whole thing.

The heart of it, though, is Chelsea Sexton, who joined the auto industry at seventeen and worked on GM’s EV1 program, married an EV1 technician, and left the company when GM wound the program down. She is the one who makes you understand that real people built this car and real people were told to stop.

What happened after the movie?

The film ends with a Tesla Roadster prototype on screen, which in 2006 was a hopeful little flourish and now reads like a prophecy.

Paine made a sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, in 2011. And twenty years on he has revised his own thesis. “The film asks the right question, but maybe not the complete one,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. The car was not murdered so much as postponed until somebody worked out how to make money on it.

The best ending, though, belongs to a single car. In October 2025 an EV1 known by VIN #212 was sold at auction for about $118,000 to Billy Caruso and a group of enthusiasts. It became the first EV1 ever legally sold to a member of the public, which GM’s lease terms were specifically written to prevent. It survived because it had been marked abandoned at Clark Atlanta University, towed away, and eventually sold off by court order from a tow pound.

Here is the turn. GM helped. Company president Mark Reuss told the restoration team: “Whatever you need, we’ll help. We will. And if we can’t, we’ll tell you we can’t.” GM supplied parts from a donor EV1 and hosted the team at its Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. The team is aiming to have it running in November 2026, on the car’s thirtieth anniversary.

The company that crushed them is helping fix one. Twenty years of a documentary asking who did it, and the defendant showed up with a wrench.

Go watch it

Not because it is a lecture. Because it is a good, angry, ninety-minute mystery about a thing our decade started and the next one buried, and because it will change what you see the next time a silent car pulls up next to you at a light. Start with the trailer the filmmakers cut back in 2005 and see if it does not get you.

That car has an ancestor. It crossed Australia on sunlight in 1987, and a GM chief executive said yes to it in September 1988, while we were all busy arguing about which single was better.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

What is the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car about?
It is a 2006 documentary directed by Chris Paine and narrated by Martin Sheen that investigates why General Motors built the EV1 electric car, leased it to drivers in Southern California and Arizona starting in December 1996, then reclaimed every car and had most of them crushed. The film examines consumers, batteries, oil companies, carmakers, the California Air Resources Board and the federal government as suspects, and delivers a verdict on each.

When did Who Killed the Electric Car come out?
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2006 and Sony Pictures Classics released it in theaters on June 28, 2006, which makes 2026 its twentieth anniversary. It holds an 89 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 105 reviews and made less than $2 million at the box office.

Was the electric car really an 80s invention?
The GM EV1 traces directly to the 1980s. GM, AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft built the solar-powered Sunraycer, which won the World Solar Challenge across Australia in November 1987. That project led directly to the GM Impact, and the film’s own timeline records GM chief executive Roger Smith agreeing to fund a consumer electric car prototype in September 1988, engineered by the same AeroVironment team. The Impact was shown in January 1990 and became the EV1 in 1996.

Why did GM crush the EV1?
GM announced in April 2003 that it could no longer supply parts for the EV1 and would not renew any leases. Because all 660 first-generation cars were leased under terms that explicitly prohibited purchase, drivers had no right to keep them. By the end of August 2004 every leased EV1 had been retrieved. About forty were donated to museums and universities and most of the remainder were sent to be crushed. Activists offered GM $1.9 million for 78 impounded cars in Burbank and got no answer.

Where can I watch Who Killed the Electric Car?
It is not on a free streaming service. It is available to rent or buy digitally, listed at $12.99 on Apple TV and Amazon Video and $13.99 on Fandango at Home.

Sources

Photos: DestinationFearFan (CC BY-SA 4.0), Dshakes (CC BY-SA 3.0), and RightBrainPhotography, Rick Rowen (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.