Max writes:
> I'm naturally sympathetic to the message here, but
> why haven't the Japanese, who have no domestic oil
> supply, develop such a car by now?
Jordan: The real answer, only given as a footnote in the movie, is that it's a difficult problem. Technologies are advancing, we'll get there. Just Not Today. The trend is unmistakable: electricity continues to grow as the significant energy source of our future (and has already taken over for many sectors; even subsectors of transportation), but in the mean time, fossil fuel is still where it's at for transportation.
[WS:] I agree about the final message of the film, but I also think that the fines point of the film was not its final optimism, but the insights how monopoly capitalism works. What matters is not the potential profitability of individual merchandise, but overall profitability of the quasi-monopolist supplier of a whole range of products.
GM (or for that matter Toyota) might have been able to turn a profit selling their electric cars, but this would introduce competition with their other lines of product - gasoline powered cars, trucks and SUVs, part manufacturers, etc. Those other lines are highly profitable now mainly because they are quasi monopolists. By producing electric cars, one hand of GM would siphon off some of the other hand's demand, jeopardizing the other hands' quasi monopoly and turf. It is so, because many people who use cars mainly for commuting might go totally electric and stop buying cars with internal combustion engines. This, in turn, would reduce sales, and consequently profits generated by gasoline powered vehicles. To maintain current profit levels (which pretty much determines their position within the corporation), these gasoline-related departments would need to increase prices on their respective products, which would promote even more users to go electric, etc.
The most important point here is that while "going electric" may not have any significant net effect on the GM (or Toyota) as a whole - it will dramatically impact the current subdivisions WITHIN these corporations, namely those that produce gasoline-specific components (engines and its parts, transmissions, etc.). Do you really think that the head cheeses running these subdivisions are going to sit with their pants down and watch their turf being eaten away by little known guys in the electric car division? Of course not. They are going to use their current power to kill the electric BEFORE it starts threatening their own turf.
Stated differently, it is not INTER-organization competition that can explain what happened with EV1 - but INTRA-organizational competition that can do it. In fact, when you look at this from an intra-organizational point of view, the whole EV1 story starts making perfect sense. The GM leadership initial decision to work on EV1 caught the big wigs in the gasoline-linked divisions with their pants down (or sleeping with their hand in a potty, as they say in the old country.) They did not think that their position WITHIN the corporation would be threatened by a small experimental project that barely registered on the organizational chart. However, when they realized that the small experimental project has a real potential of undermining that position in rather short time period, the big wigs from gasoline-related subdivisions woke up and killed the threat before it had a chance of taking off. This applies to GM as well as other car companies (Toyota, Honda, etc.), which are similarly structured.
This explains not only why a company devoured its own child, but also why several different companies that in the neoclassical/neoliberal fairy tale are supposed to compete with each other and take advantage of each other blunders, did the exact same thing. Far from competing, big corps follow and ape each other. As soon as GM division chiefs saw a threat to their turf from their own electric department, the word spread out to Toyota, Honda et al. Each of these intra-corporate interest groups moved in the same direction to protect their own turf, without even having to collude and conspire with each other. So here is your explanation why auto-manufacturers in oil-rich US did the same thing as auto-manufacturers in oil-poor Japan.
Wojtek