We swear this will be our final electric-car post, at least until the next one, but there was one other tidbit we learned from Chris Paine, the writer-director of the excellent Who Killed the Electric Car?, which is now playing at Edwards University in Irvine.
Paine, Seal Beach activist Doug Korthof and actor-director Peter Horton (who you may recall from TV's thirtysomething) were among the leasees of GM EV-1s who tried desperately to extend their leases, buy their cars outright and delay the automaker's confiscation of their prized autos as long as possible. You could feel the heartbreak when Horton's is shown in the film being towed away finally. All three also fought like the dickens to prevent their confiscated cars and hundreds more from being crushed–another losing battle, sadly.
But here's something the three also had in common: bills around $1,200 each from GM after their leases expired. Even though the cars were crushed, the dealers–like they do with the gas-powered versions–went through each vehicle with fine-toothed combs (or whatever the hell it is they use) to find any scratch or scrape they could bill the leasees for. Now, this makes sense for cars that are going to be re-sold, but vehicles headed for the crusher? Amazing.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.