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But the significance of the Hanssen hackers goes beyond Toyota, beyond the Prius. It has revived interest in battery-electric cars just as Tesla Motors and other electric carmakers are poking their noses out of the ground. A film called Who Killed the Electric Car? released in 2006 by Sony Pictures, made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival-not least because GM and other automotive powers geared up a spin campaign against the film. The conspiracy-minded flick aimed to tell the “real” story behind the early demise of the GM EV1, an electric car introduced in the mid-19903 and withdrawn from the market by the car giant by 2004. Only a few hundred ever made it out into the real world. 

Chris Paine, the film’s director, and Dean Devlin, the executive producer (best known for Godzilla and Independence Day) both owned EV1s during the brief period a decade ago when the big car companies sold battery-electric cars in parts of America. The car giants did so not because they wanted to but because California regulators forced them to sell some zero emissions cars. Grudging though it was, GM did manage to produce the superfast EV1-the most aerodynamic production car ever made. The EV1 proved hugely popular among California’s green and gadget-loving set, the same crowd that is now rushing to buy the Toyota Prius. However, unlike today do hybrid cars, which are growing into a mass-market phenomenon, the EV1 and other electric cars bit the dust. 

Car companies insist that the reason the original battery cars failed was lack of consumer interest, which has some legitimacy given the limited range of those cars, but that view is turned on its head here. The film investigates various possible culprits behind the “murder” of the electric car in turn-oil giants, carmakers, consumers, regulators, hydrogen energy (a rival technology), and so on-before pointing the finger at the true culprit. In one sequence, activists sneak into GM’s secret testing grounds via helicopter and film the company crushing the beloved EV1s-in direct contradiction to the company’s public vow to save the car. Chelsea Sexton, a former marketer of EV1 cars and a star of the Elm, typifies the view of the plug-in crowd when she blames gullible regulators and cynical carmakers for abandoning electric cars for the distant dream of hydrogen. Inspired by the hacking of Priuses, various lobbying groups have sprung up, hoping to entice manufacturers to produce plug-ins and to push politicians to support them. Sexton, for example, now helps run Plug in America, a group that includes Jim Woolsey, a former head of the CIA.

Felix Kramer runs the California Cars Initiative (CalCars), a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes plug-ins. With help from Greg Hanssen’s Energy CS, his outfit created the first plug in Prius-though it used cheap lead-acid batteries, which are much heavier and shorter-lived than lithium-ion ones. During Earth Day celebrations in April 2006, Ron Gremban, CalCars’ technology guru, led a group that converted a Prius into a plug in in three days, while the public watched. In coordination with the Electric Auto Association, CalCars planned to release a free, open-source version of its conversion instructions. 

Excerpted from Page 270-271 of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran