Who Killed The Electric Car?

Who Killed The Electric Car? is a pretty good documentary. Until I saw it, I didn't know that electric cars actually existed. California had a law that car companies had to make zero-emission vehicles, and all the major car makers produced electric cars. They produced 2% of the pollution of a regular car (taking into account the pollution from the power plants that generate their electricity) and the electricity costs one-fifth the cost of gasoline (per mile) - an amazing piece of technology with a lot of potential to only get better.

However, the car companies, Big Oil, and the Bush administration sued California to kill the program and they succeeded. Why? There are a lot of reasons given in the movie; I thought one of the more compelling ones was that the car companies make billions of dollars in car parts and service (oil changes, oil filters, brakes, mufflers, etc.), but the electric cars have almost no parts (as there is no combusion engine) and the parts they do have (e.g. brakes) were designed to be a whole magnitude more efficient, so the don't need to be replaced.