video review. who killed the electric car?

who killed the electric car?, a film released in 2006 by chris payne. This film goes on to explain why the electric car did not become a success, despite all its very positive qualities in comparison to petrol cars. The main car they target and look at is the EV-1 but this video goes onto explain how despite something being a great design it can still be highly disapproved due to consumers AND mostly what the big companies already want.

The key factor in this is how the electric car will essentially save the environment but how this was not accepted due to the big companies wanting to keep profits up. Some of the kye issues to why the electric car did not go ahead with was because of consumer acceptance, skeptics, oil industry funding media to go against electric vehicles, advertising from competition, supply and demand, limitations of the product, too difficult to kick start the category of cars, federal government lack of support and most of all it being a threat to the oil companies resulting in a provoked war of david vs golliath.

Alot of the american consumers were worried about the risk. Some companies like General motors would only talk about the limitations of the car....for example it can only do between 60 and 80 miles on one charge.....most consumers dont realise that this is more than enough for what somebody needs for one day, but because they realise that is less than a petrol car it already inspires people more to get the petrol, this resulted in less people wanting the car and hence resulting in a lower supply and demand.

When the supply and demand was low it resulted in less funding for the vehicle, meaning the vehicle would cost more, this resulted in another key factor to why people did not want the vehicle.

The other largest downside is that for the electric car to go ahead it would be going against competition much bigger than it can handle, the competition would be throwing an endless amount of money into proving that petrol is the way to go.

Of all the video's i have watched for the duration of this course i have actually admired this single one the most, it covers a topic that i admire, but more importantly it targets the reality of design, in the fact that just because a design is good and better than the rest, does not mean it will be more successful than the rest, it has the big key issue that it is up against forces much stronger than it, along with that it is the whole factor of "change" that makes it more difficult, the good side is that because of this technology and its ability we know that eventually the design WILL go ahead, maybe by a different company but eventually it will be accepted as we can not constantly rely on petrol and non renewable resources. In the end it all comes down to where the big companies can earn the most money from.