Would you as a consumer be inclined to keep a car that cost you $3 for a "fill-up," required no gasoline or oil changes or muffler, and produced no toxic emissions? Would you as the manufacturer -- having spent billions to develop it, with a built-in market and waiting list of buyers -- be inclined to halt production and not just recall but physically destroy the whole fleet?

	The EV1 at a charging station in the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Click photo for larger image. 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' Rating: PG in nature. Director: Chris Paine. Web site: www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar

The answer to both questions is "yes." The astonishing explanation is contained in a must-see documentary called "Who Killed the Electric Car?," opening at the Squirrel Hill Theater today. This true-life murder mystery from the 1990s, with tremendous economic relevance to 2006, is the story of General Motors' revolutionary EV1 electric automobile, a techno-child -- and child prodigy -- of the urban smog crisis.

Watching the tale unfold in director Chris Paine's careful chronicle, I wondered if I'd been abducted (with Elvis and JFK) and held by space aliens at the time it took place. How could we not have known about this before? Where were we between 1990-1996?

"We," for the most part, were not in California. Bits and pieces of the story that appeared elsewhere couldn't convey the context and didn't relate to "us" in the other 49 states.

The context was California's 1990 public-health emergency resulting from auto exhaust: 19 pounds of carbon dioxide per every gallon of gas used in an internal-combustion engine. A zero-emissions mandate required 2 percent of new vehicles in the state to be free of pollutants by 1998 (10 percent by 2003).

GM's Saturn division was ready with a "green" prototype: The emission-free EV1 ran on electricity, with excellent speed and efficiency. The drawback was that it could only go 60 or 70 miles between rechargings. But most folks (90 percent) drive fewer than 30 miles a day. Lots of people wanted it and, when it became available in 1996, loved it.

The oil companies did not. Neither did the conventional automotive industry, the battery and muffler and repair businesses that fed off it or the lobbyists and the confederacy of government-regulatory dunces that did their bidding.

Paine makes an effort to represent their point of view. A network of electric battery "refueling" stations had to be created, marketing was difficult, consumers were not yet convinced to order the EV1 in huge numbers, and, above all, motorists' long-distance driving patterns would have to be changed.

Heavier emphasis (and too much repetition) is given to the other side. Paine's most compelling interview footage is with EV1 sales specialist-activist Chelsea Sexton, the chief rebel with EV1's lost cause. Non-industry commentators include such unlikely celebrity bedfellows as Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Phyllis Diller (God bless her not-so-crazy soul), who provide stirring testimonials.

It doesn't take a genius to guess which side the Bush administration would be on. Dubya and his longtime chief of staff, Andrew Card (ex-president of the California Car Manufacturers Association, who left the government post in March), weighed in with a preference for the hydrogen-fuel alternative, an embryonic technology requiring decades and billions of R&D dollars, while the tested solution is right at hand. They argue that the electric car can't meet everyone's needs, and it's true -- only 90 percent.

The EV1 toddler, briefly alive and well, was euthanized instead of nurtured to maturity. Of its multiple murderers, the most shocking (and depressing) was GM itself. Never in history, says one observer, "was a company so cannibalistic about its own product," determined, in the end, not only to kill the product but to wipe out the evidence and even the memory that it ever existed.

Gas was "only" $2 a gallon then. Now's it's $3. Who needs fuel efficiency, let alone fresh air?.....