Revenge of the Electric Car

When last we saw the electric car in filmmaker Chris Paine’s viewfinder, it was lying crushed and abandoned in an Arizona junkyard, a good idea deemed unfeasible by its maker, General Motors, to the outrage of everyone who’d actually driven one. Paine’s 2006 broadside, “Who Killed the Electric Car?,’’ was the best kind of partisan documentary: informative, clear-eyed, and mad as hell. The follow-up, “Revenge of the Electric Car,’’ arrives today and it’s a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.

Instead of an issue, Paine trains his camera on people: the handful of executives and tinkerers, inside the automotive industry and on its fringes, who are struggling to make electric cars a reality. In the process, “Revenge’’ becomes a business story, one with many threads and an ending yet to be written. Following GM’s aborted EV1 program in the early 2000s - the company leased the electric runabouts to consumers, then broke off the deal and took them back - a motley collection of individuals have continued to carry the ball upfield.

Some of them are the expected visionaries, young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who took the gajillions he made from selling PayPal and started Tesla Motors, the first auto company solely dedicated to electric car production. But what are we to make of Bob Lutz, a General Motors vice chairman, old-guard auto industry guy, and global-warming skeptic who nonetheless believes electric cars are inevitable and thus chooses to spearhead the development of the Chevy Volt? Or Carlos Ghosn, the Machiavellian CEO of Nissan, who pushes ahead with the zero-emissions Leaf, the first affordable mass-produced e-car?

Paine gets a startling amount of face time with these big boys, in public, in private, and in closed-door meetings; one wonders, in particular, how many of his cards Ghosn is willing to show the camera. But the point is made that these businessmen aren’t (just) doing it for the green publicity but because they recognize that electric cars are the future and it’s best to get there first. Lutz is especially good company as a Detroit dinosaur feeling his oats late in the day.