Featuring Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Peter Horton, and Chelsea Sexton. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

It's rare when a documentary elucidates a problem that its natural audience doesn't even know it has. But that's the case with Who Killed the Electric Car?, a whydunnit that gives us a disturbing””while still entertaining””glimpse of a civilization running on fumes.

Most of us weren't especially aware that there was ever a plug-in roadster to bump off in the first place. In fact, at the height of the Clinton era, industry leader General Motors came out with an electric vehicle, or EV1, that turned out to be a much better bet than the wager they had actually made. After some improvements to the battery system, allowing commuters to travel farther than they actually need to go on an average day, the sleek new ride (and a few others made for Ford and Toyota) inspired California's emissions-control board to create a mandate that would eventually require 10 percent of all cars in the nation's largest state to be totally nonpolluting by the beginning of this decade.

Apparently, capitalism isn't as pure as it used to be, or else GM and friends would have been thrilled to encounter legislatively supported demand for a superior product for which it owned significant patents. But, in fact, the car companies, alongside their incestuous partners in petroleum freaked at the notion of cars plugging in at home or at spread-out recharging stops. So GM and others went all out to squash their own success.

Writer-director Chris Paine, with Martin Sheen narrating, shapes the story into a game of Clue, with the various economic and political interests and consumers themselves standing in for Colonel Mustard in the study with an unleaded pipe. Even without a lot of background in science, technology, or plain old common sense, viewers can pretty easily figure out why status quo–addicted automakers and venal oil men in the White House might work together against the interests of their fellow countrymen. But it still stings, and stinks, when you realize how much expensive effort they have already put into thwarting the inevitable.

Along the way, some major stars, such as Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson, and less notable ones (Alexandra Paul, Peter Horton, and... Phyllis Diller?) palaver about the electric cars””which the companies were only willing to lease, not sell. We meet politicians of notable cowardice, and worse, and also see snippets of spectacularly ambivalent ads that GM dreamed up, seemingly to make potential EV1 buyers think of Hiroshima on a bad day. Thanks to GM's intransigence in the face of global warming, many more of us may know what that feels like.

Featuring Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Peter Horton, and Chelsea Sexton. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

2It's rare when a documentary elucidates a problem that its natural audience doesn't even know it has. But that's the case with Who Killed the Electric Car?, a whydunnit that gives us a disturbing””while still entertaining””glimpse of a civilization running on fumes.

Most of us weren't especially aware that there was ever a plug-in roadster to bump off in the first place. In fact, at the height of the Clinton era, industry leader General Motors came out with an electric vehicle, or EV1, that turned out to be a much better bet than the wager they had actually made. After some improvements to the battery system, allowing commuters to travel farther than they actually need to go on an average day, the sleek new ride (and a few others made for Ford and Toyota) inspired California's emissions-control board to create a mandate that would eventually require 10 percent of all cars in the nation's largest state to be totally nonpolluting by the beginning of this decade.

Apparently, capitalism isn't as pure as it used to be, or else GM and friends would have been thrilled to encounter legislatively supported demand for a superior product for which it owned significant patents. But, in fact, the car companies, alongside their incestuous partners in petroleum freaked at the notion of cars plugging in at home or at spread-out recharging stops. So GM and others went all out to squash their own success.

Writer-director Chris Paine, with Martin Sheen narrating, shapes the story into a game of Clue, with the various economic and political interests and consumers themselves standing in for Colonel Mustard in the study with an unleaded pipe. Even without a lot of background in science, technology, or plain old common sense, viewers can pretty easily figure out why status quo–addicted automakers and venal oil men in the White House might work together against the interests of their fellow countrymen. But it still stings, and stinks, when you realize how much expensive effort they have already put into thwarting the inevitable.

Along the way, some major stars, such as Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson, and less notable ones (Alexandra Paul, Peter Horton, and... Phyllis Diller?) palaver about the electric cars””which the companies were only willing to lease, not sell. We meet politicians of notable cowardice, and worse, and also see snippets of spectacularly ambivalent ads that GM dreamed up, seemingly to make potential EV1 buyers think of Hiroshima on a bad day. Thanks to GM's intransigence in the face of global warming, many more of us may know what that feels like.