As cover-ups go, one of the world’s best occurred in the last decade. Bigger than Roswell and more damaging than Gulf War One was the death of General Motors’ Saturn EV. As world-changing moments go, this event slipped right under the radar.

Long before Toyota trumpeted the hybrid Prius, GM released the first of their revolutionary electric cars. Fast, quiet, efficient and non-polluting – this was the vehicle the whole world needed. Developed in response to Californian law requiring vehicles with zero emissions, the Saturn was an instant hit despite unnecessarily inferior battery performance. Even so, a single charge would run nearly 200kms. Other manufacturers followed suit. The year was 1996.

Within a decade, GM revoked leases on the Saturn (its cars were never available for sale), reclaimed the vehicles and had them shredded. Why would a company cannibalise its own product? Company line is at odds with the filmmaker’s assertions that point fingers at domineering oil companies and their masters. Aggressive non-marketing and a desire to call black white was a spectacular success: the EV was pushed from collective consciousness and a green-light given to developing unproven technology.

Conventionally filmed, struggling for balance and shamefully emotive, Who Killed the Electric Car? is not a world class documentary. Yet it offers a window on corporate shenanigans, political machinations and consumer apathy that induces a head-shaking denunciation of corporate hegemony, well-paid pollies and environmental crime. Like An Inconvenient Truth for which it is a perfect companion, this will also have rabid, right-wing opinionistas shrieking from their quills. Yet ask them this: why wait twenty years for hydrogen fuel when you could drive an electric car today?

// COLIN FRASER