'Who Killed the Electric Car?' will get you fired up

Electric cars. They were a utopian fantasy, right? An idea that lived briefly in the form of prototypes owned by movie stars, but eventually proved unworkable compared with gas/electric hybrids and the promise of hydrogen fuel cells?

Sony Pictures Classics 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' 4 out of 5 stars The verdict: Drives home anger at the vehicles' needless demise. Director: Chris Paine Cast: Martin Sheen, Dave Barthmuss, Jim Boyd, Alec N. Brooks, Alan Cocconi Run time: 90 minutes Release date: June 28, 2006 Rating: PG for brief mild language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Who Killed the Electric Car?'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Nope. For a few brief years, a small fleet of electric vehicles cruised the highways in California, where regulations had been passed to promote their development. Yes, many were leased to celebrities (those promoting the cars wanted to place them with high-profile drivers such as Tom Hanks), but people who weren't famous got them, too. Almost everyone who drove one, it seems, wanted to keep it.

But when the leases expired, automakers refused to sell these cars to the converted customers. They collected them and trucked them out to the desert — where these technological marvels were crushed, then shredded into metal and glass confetti.

The whys and hows of this are infuriating. The new documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is not a movie designed to put viewers at ease, and thank goodness.

The film is nothing special in aesthetic terms, and it suffers a bit from a voiceover track in which Martin Sheen sounds like his "West Wing" character President Bartlet crossed with the sing-songy narrator of an educational film. But the story itself is so compelling that this hardly matters.

It's chock-full of information that counteracts myths about its subject. (Think the cars required a lot of tricky maintenance? Try rotating the tires and refilling the wiper fluid every 5,000 miles. As a mechanic who serviced them points out, EVs eliminated the need for messy, expensive stuff such as the oil and air filters that provide a big part of automakers' profit.) And it brings stories to light that should have been big news, had wars and elections and terror alerts not crowded them off the front page.

It also, after telling its sordid whodunit, points in some hopeful directions. After licking their wounds, electric vehicle activists have formed groups (like those at pluginpartners.com and austinev.org) to promote do-it-yourself options and to convince automakers and legislators that a market exists for these vehicles — if only they'll let consumers buy them.