With electric vehicle sales continuing to see record growth and the government setting goals for half of all new cars to be electric by 2030, it's increasingly inevitable that these vehicles will affect other parts of our lives — even pop culture.
To imagine what that world might look like, The Cool Down asked film obsessive — and EV expert — David Gray to dig back into the past and break down how five iconic car movies would be different with EVs.
'Duel' (1971)
In Steven Spielberg's gasoline-fueled classic, an oil tanker driver stalks a salesman (Dennis Weaver) through the desert, with gas station attacks, plumes of exhaust smoke, and in the finale, a gasoline trick.
This internal combustion engine-powered game of cat and mouse plays out entirely on and around the highway. The vehicles — a grimy Peterbilt and a wheezing Plymouth Valiant — define the oil and gasoline culture of the early '70s.
Would it work with EVs? The truck could be an EV hauling batteries. In place of gas stations, we'd have charging stations. But the stops would be longer, which could lead to nail-biting scenes where we see the charge tick up one percent at a time.
Big Gas Moment: Weaver drives the car into the truck, leaping clear, as flames and smoke blind the truck driver, who plummets into the canyon. EV batteries can catch fire, but not this fast or dirty.
Our replacement idea? EVs are really fast from standing, so have the car parked at the edge of the drop, and when the truck goes to push it over, it accelerates out of the way.'Mad Max' (1979)
"Mad Max" was made after the global oil crises of the '70s, but it was set in 1984. Director George Miller gave us a world where gasoline ("guzzoline") was running out and civilization was collapsing. Max (Mel Gibson) was a cop trying to hold it all together with his V8 Interceptor Pursuit Special.
In an EV version, there would have been power shortages, but given that Australia now meets around a third of its power through clean energy, a film set in 2024 wouldn't have caused the breakdown of society. Imagine if they just had some solar panels. Instead of a hopeless "Mad Max," we might have had an "Irritated But Sustainable Max."
And what would he have driven? Maybe a Rimac Nevera retooled for off-road speeding.
Big Gas Moment: Max finds Johnny, one of the gang members who killed his family, by a wrecked car. Max handcuffs Johnny to the wreck by his ankle before lighting a fuse to the ruptured gas tank.
In an EV world, Max could have set fire to the battery, knowing it would burn hot, but it would have been a lot less poetic, or explosive.'Maximum Overdrive' (1986)
Horror writer Stephen King only directed one movie, which he later disowned, vowing never to direct again. Yes, "Maximum Overdrive" is that bad, but in many ways, it's become iconically bad — and ICE cars are at the center of the story.
To summarize: an alien-controlled comet causes machines to become sentient and murderous. A handful of survivors hole up in a gas station and are besieged by trucks (led by one with a Green Goblin face), who force the humans to pump gas for them.
Big Gas Moment: When the humans decide to flee to a car-less island, battling a bulldozer, trucks, and a killer ice cream van on the way. The killer trucks could be EVs, and the gas station a charging station, but that can take anything from 30 minutes to eight hours, so the plot would move much slower.'No Country for Old Men' (2007)
This movie, based on Cormac McCarthy's classic novel, is set in 1980, when EVs didn't exist — but it could have been set now.
The movie's most famous scene involves a gas station and its owner, who tries to engage bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in conversation when he stops to fuel up a car he's stolen. The hapless attendant asks about the weather in Dallas, having presumably spotted the Texas plate when Chigurh filled the car with gas. Chigurh makes the poor man play along with a coin toss where his life is at stake.
In an EV world, charging station attendants are rare, and it's unlikely that there would have been one, so we'd need to have Chigurh menace someone else to show us how dangerous he is. That's not so easy, and gas stations are movie-makers' go-to plot locations for showing us something in isolation. But it could be one of any number of encounters with strangers.
Big Gas Moment: Chigurh stuffs a rag into a gas tank to cause a distraction so he can steal medical supplies from a pharmacy. This doesn't have an EV analog. He could have done something else, but it would have lacked the jarring explosion that served to remind us of Chigurh's fondness for disproportionate violence.'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)
In the most critically acclaimed entry in the "Mad Max" saga, we're now in the year 2050, decades after a nuclear war, where dictator Immortan Joe and his mutant War Boys control a clean-water spring in the desert.
"Fury Road" is, in many ways, an ecological fable about men destroying the natural world in an endless pursuit of resources. In the end, a group of women led by Furiosa (Charlize Theron) kill the evil men, take charge of the water, and prepare to plant a bag of seeds. Here, renewable resources like food and water are ultimately shown to be more important than fleeting ones, like gas.
Big Gas Moment: Max (Tom Hardy) and Nux (Nicholas Hoult) spit fuel into the engine intakes to get a burst of speed. In an EVs-only world, we could go with an extra electric motor and a big red booster button instead.
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