It’s not often that you find environmentalists protesting about a company’s refusal to manufacture a car. But the placards outside the Ford offices in San Francisco last October denounced the company’s decision to ditch the Th!nk City model. Following its unveiling in Europe in 2000, it was introduced to the US in a flurry of Los Angeles glitz in January 2002-only to be discontinued months later.
The Th!nk City runs for only 53 miles at a stretch, with a top speed of around 56 mph. But the car is all-electric: it needs no petrol and produces no pollution. It was once billed as the car of the future; now it is a has-been that never really was.
This is the latest in a series of recent blows to the electric-vehicle (EV) industry. General Motors has stopped producing its flagship model, the EV1. Meanwhile, GM and DaimlerChysler (who, along with Ford, constitute the “big three” US car manufacturers) teamed up with other automobile companies to take out a lawsuit against the state of California’s “zero-emission vehicle” policy, which stipulates that from 2003, 2 per cent of all vehicles sold in the state should emit no polluting exhaust gases, and 8 per cent should be close to zero emission.
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