While Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may be the noisiest documentary of the summer, indeed the year, Who Killed the Electric Car? is certainly the slickest. It is also the perfect companion piece. What initially seems like a typically boutique documentary-style question – who cares about a couple hundred car owners in California? – becomes a fascinating murder mystery that hints at something much larger, indicting not only big business but also the pragmatic mind of the average consumer.

We’re first given a history lesson. In the early days of the automobile the electric car compared favorably with the noisy, smelly internal combustion engine model. It was Henry Ford’s innovations with the assembly line that eventually saw to the dominance of the gas-powered car, and the electric car quietly withered away. The mind leaps at the What If? possibilities; it’s almost impossible to fathom how differently the 20th century would have turned out, for America and the world, if we’d never built our addiction to foreign oil. Electric Car hints only briefly at these larger implications, and moves on.

Back in the early 90’s the state of California decided to get tough on car emissions. Smog conditions were atrocious, the thinning ozone layer was all over the news, and lung-related health issues were sharply rising. So the California Air Resources Board (CARB) set the harshest standards in the country. By 1998, 2% of cars on California roads would be required to run emissions-free. By 2003, 10%. And upward until, feasibly, no cars in the state of California would produce carbon dioxide pollution.

GM was the first to comply. Their electric car, the EV1, was fast, efficient, and clean. Typical tune-ups required rotating the tires and refilling the windshield wiper fluid. It consumed no gas and used no oil. The beginnings of a new support infrastructure was built—electric ‘refueling’ stations still stand, unused, throughout California. Honda and Toyota started work on their own EVs. Sure, the EV1 could only travel up to 120 miles on a charge, but exactly how many miles do you drive in a day?

Sounds like the perfect car. So what happened?

DaimlerChrysler decided not to play ball anymore. Their lawsuit forced CARB to reword their regulation—car companies had to produce X amount of zero-emissions cars, but could get lenient treatment if they could prove that there was little to no market demand for the vehicle.

GM could not ask for a more favorably stacked deck. How do you prove the masses aren’t clamoring for a product? Suppress it. Build an esoteric and bizarre ad campaign for the product. Use inferior batteries while buying out and suppressing technology that could improve the EV1’s performance. Require people to go through ridiculous ordeals to get their hands on one—such as asking Mel Gibson to fill out a resumé on who he was just to get one. (Really.) Don’t allow those leasing EV1’s to renew, no matter what. And when it’s all said and done, round the cars up and have them crushed.

But it’s not that simple. What Electric Car does so entertainingly—so engrossingly—is paint a full portrait of all the major players both for and against what could have been one of the most important technological innovations in a century known for them. Various suspects are lined up, from state and federal government to big oil and GM, and culpability is assessed. But the guilty aren’t just easy targets, like monolithic corporations. Consumer apathy is equally to blame.

Electric Car is an adept documentary, skillfully and energetically arranged around the ingenious device of the murder mystery. The passion of the filmmakers and the interviewees is palpable, and though it’s a tragedy that revolutionary technology was so cynically crushed, there is no hint of sour grapes in any single frame. What happened is presented as instructional, rather than bitter, and we’re left with the sense that we can still turn this thing around if we want it bad enough. Who Killed the Electric Car? is the best documentary of 2006 so far, and one of the best films of the year.