Actor Tom Hanks recently defended himself against the New Yorker, who called him out on his appearance in “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Here’s his letter to the editor:
Peter J. Boyer, in his otherwise spot-on piece about the car industry, assumes that I once leased G.M.’s sadly fated EV1 electric car and, like other drivers of that twin-seat rocket of a vehicle, watched the emission-free car be wrested from my garage, towed away, and busted up into pieces of metal, glass, and rubber smaller than razor blades (“The Road Ahead,” April 27th). Luckily, I did not. The source of Boyer’s slight inaccuracy may have been the documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” which used a clip of a visit I made to the “Late Show with David Letterman,” during which I claimed to be saving America one electric car at a time. However, by the time I began shopping for an all-electric car, in 2003, the EV1 had already been yanked from showrooms as if the car had never existed. Instead, I found what was purported to be the very last electric car available for sale in the state of California—a Toyota EV. It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine. I have the pink slip. I own that car, and it is still driven every day, albeit by one of my crack staff of employees. My electric car recently crossed fifty thousand miles on the odometer with its original battery but without so much as a splash of gasoline.
Tom Hanks
Los Angeles, Calif.
As much as I like Mr Hanks, he is extremely naive to think that although his car hasn’t used any petrol he is saving the environment.
Electricity doesn’t come from plants or trees. It comes from sources like Nuclear (which generates toxic and radioactive waste) and coal (which is quite dirty in itself, but a lot cleaner than it used to be). A small amount does come from renewable sources (i.e. Wind, hydro, etc) but not enough.
Tackle the problem at source.
electricity is so much better! i dont know why people are so confused about energy, you can get it on a local level so much cheaper and efficiently! take the power from the government and from foreign oil companies what more common sense do you need? but then again most Americans think walmarts help there economy cause of jobs!
As much as I like Mr Hanks, he is extremely naive to think that although his car hasn’t used any petrol he is saving the environment.
It’s fun to take everything a celebrity says literally, isn’t it?
At least he hasn’t used any arab oil. I’d take that as a start and then worry about the rest later.
@ Katie: Totally. +50
Question for all greenies that think their electric cars are “green”, or “environmentally friendly”: Where the hell do you think the electricity used to power up your batteries comes from? Far more electricity in pumped into the grid by coal, oil, and nuclear power than by anything considered clean. I’d also like to know what you people think happens to the materials in those batteries when they die. 50,000 miles on Mr. Hanks’ car is great, but what happens when that car hits 100k or more and the batteries go kaput? It’s a trade off. No choice is 100% clean.
Sigh, Tom has over-estimated his size and importance ever since he starred in the movie BIG in 1988. I still like the guy, though.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094737/
Still I’ve never understood the public’s interest in the opinions of people who are paid to act like someone else tells them to act.
superbadd75 asks, “Where the hell do you think the electricity used to power up your batteries comes from?”
You can stop whining about people who are trying to solve a problem the best way they know how – short of becoming subsistence hermits.
If you go to EVNut.com and check the owner’s gallery, you’ll find that about half of the owners pictured have an SPV array.
Probably, some have paid the upcharge for “green” power from the grid, usually windmills, which further greens the grid indirectly, by making more money available for windmills.
Sure, no choice, at present, is 100% green but you’re slapping at people who believe going green is important and are certainly doing more than their share. Their choices encourage the development of more green technologies and choices.
I don’t know about the Toyota Rav4-EV battery situation but Toyota puts a sizeable bounty on their Prius NiMH batteries; they get recycled, for sure. It’s likely the Rav4-EV has a similar program. If not, the materials valuable enough to recycle, anyway.
“I’d also like to know what you people think happens to the materials in those batteries when they die.”
Mostly they get recycled.
I really do think “Man Made Climate Change” is “a crock of shit” but I’m all for EVs like was said earlier:
To not use Arab or Central/South American OIL.
You can argue about where electricity comes from all day long but it still doesn’t excuse GM for destroying perfectly good electric vehicles.
People “in the industy” have argued until they are blue in the face about all the liabilities, etc. as to why GM had to confiscate and destroy the EV1. Still, the ensuing PR nightmare has probably cost GM ten fold what it would’ve if they had just kept the program running.
Just another Epic Failure in the dust heap of history that is GM.
How long are we going to keep flogging this silly-EV-drivers-think-electricity-is-magic canard?
Tom Hanks lives in California. If you look at the maps you’ll find here, you can very quickly see that that means roughly 30% of his electricity usage comes from hydro, wind, geothermal or solar sources, depending on what parts of the state he frequents and whether or not he pays more for green power (if I had to guess, I’d guess he does). And that number is going up.
Moreover, even if his source of power were using the same non-green fuel (gas, diesel), central electricity generation is still substantially more efficient than millions of small internal combustion engines generating their own power (and waste heat). For that matter, if the bulk of the cars in the country ran on electricity, you could substantially improve the green-ness of our transportation options by changing the central electricity source (from a coal-fired plant to hydrogen, say) when a new technology makes greener generation possible.
Furthermore, the kinds of less-green sources California does use (nuclear–which may or may not be green depending on whom you ask, natural gas, & biomass) are domestic. Read into that whatever baggage you wish regarding the propping up of hostile foreign governments.
The simple fact that they’re not a magic bullet does not mean that EV’s aren’t an improvement. And it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone who thinks they are an improvement is some kind of hapless dupe who couldn’t hope to measure up to your vast intellectual capacities.
I think this is a classic example of celebrity hating.
Nowhere in that letter does Hanks proclaim that he is ‘saving the environment’ like Al Gore (who invented the internet).
All he said was his car did not ever use any gasoline which is true.
I don’t think Hanks is a good actor but that’s besides the point; you are condemning a man based on what he didn’t say.
How is it Hank’s fault where his electricity or where his battery chemistry came from?
I’m just sick of everybody from Hollywood or Washington, and want them to all go away and do manual labor on a farm for about 15 years, so they’ll know what real work is.
Am I allowed that?
Katie:
you say: “Tackle the problem at its source”
the problem is the west’s unsatisfiable thirst for energy and the developing world’s desire to consume [energy] like the west.
This problem has many sources, one of them being personal transportation.
If ‘we’ waited to ‘change’ personal transportation from petrol to something based on electricity (hydrogen, batteries, etc) until there was not a single coal, nuclear, solar-panel (dirty fabrication) electricity source pumping energy into the grid, we’d be waiting a long time.
KatiePuckrik :
May 14th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Electricity doesn’t come from plants or trees. It comes from sources like Nuclear (which generates toxic and radioactive waste) and coal (which is quite dirty in itself, but a lot cleaner than it used to be). A small amount does come from renewable sources (i.e. Wind, hydro, etc) but not enough.
———————————————–
If we talk about coal, then an EV can use coal-electricity to run, while a gasoline car can only idle there.
If we talk about gasoline/diesel/natural_gas, then an EV can use gasoline/diesel/natural_gas generated electricity to run, while the other car would use its ICE to burn those fuels. The problem is, the massive turbines at generating station is far more efficient than your typical I4 or V6.
So yeah, electric cars are more efficient than gasoline cars.
I sense a bit of smugness in what Hanks wrote, but who cares. It is unfortunate he felt the need to go into the details of his EV shopping instead of saying, “Look, the article was factually incorrect, but I own one of these EV’s, and am glad to be doing a small part to help reduce oil dependence.”, but he’s been convinced others are as interested in the minutia of his life as he is.
Bottom line is a lot of other people said they wanted something similar to an EV, and a few years later, the Prius is Toyota’s halo brand.
he is extremely naive to think that although his car hasn’t used any petrol he is saving the environment.
Not that I’m an expert on the man, but he tends to have a sarcastic sense of humor. He obviously likes EV’s, but his comment on Letterman about saving America was clearly a joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZT61Dgbvs
His letter to the editor was to correct a mistake that was made about his experience with the EV-1. Namely, he wanted to point out that he owns a Toyota, and never leased an EV-1. In the process, he took the opportunity to extol the virtues of EV’s. Personally, I’m just impressed that he reads The New Yorker.
Hm. He owns an electric vehicle, but someone on his staff has to drive it.
Well, all righty then.
“and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind”
Is that useful in California?
The New Yorker used to be famous for its fact-checking.
Now, not so much. But its statements are still accepted as gospel by other journalists.
I think what the EV movement needs right now is a halo car and a halo truck that can out perform their gas powered counterparts. The vast majority of people aren’t going to purchase EVs until they’re able to surpass gas/disiel in performance, utility, maintenance cost, and convenience. Looks like they’re getting closer to this, but the fact remains that self righteous whining isn’t a good selling point.
@KatiePuckrik and superbadd75
and per http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2009/apr/electric-grid/ California uses coal for less than 1% of its electricity generating capacity.
@superbadd75 I’m not sure why you think Nuclear isn’t clean energy it’s way greener than Coal
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/us/25sludge.html
I live near nuclear plants and coal plants and given the issues with the recent ash spill I’m more worried about the coal plants.
You could argue the scientific American articles title is inaccurate but I think the concept is sound. Coal plants aren’t the model of Green power and Nuclear plants aren’t as bad as many assume them to be.
I’m not wild about NP, and coal is really awful when you factor in the mountain top mining in Appalachia along with the CO2. Holdren, Obama’s head of Sci and Tech policy, recently said we’d be using some more NP, and when he says it, I take notice. (He has no axes to grind, no inherent biases, which I know because I took a class from him in the ’70s.) I doubt it’s going to make a huge contribution. It’s currently 20% of US electricity, and electricity is currently somewhere around 15% of US energy consumption, so it’s really somewhere ~3% of total energy, and I doubt we’ll see it go much beyond 30-40% of total electricity. Wind is too inexpensive, according to my source at CMU.
There are also a lot of expectations hinging on carbon capture and sequestration, whch would take away the CO2 impact of coal, which doesn’t make it clean, but helps. Still unclear whether they will make that cheap enough though.
Dear assorted troglodytes:
The typical coal power plant, dirty as it may be, is still cleaner per generated watt than is the typical internal combustion engine, even if you don’t take into account the possibility of more efficient future emissions improvements, and the whole idling thing.
Don’t be too impressed. A letter to the editor doesn’t necessarily mean he reads new yorker.
I’m sure one of his assistants (perhaps even the one who drives the tomoco EV) have google searches running, and/or pay a press-clipping agnecy to send them hits on the brand of Tom Hanks.
Similarly, a letter to the editor of new yorker, in his name, doesn’t necessarily mean he wrote it.