The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle.

• Author: Wald, Matthew L.

By Michael Shnayerson Random House, $25

When California decided in 1990 that it would require the production of electric cars, General Motors commissioned an outside firm to build one. This was rather like a meat-and-potatoes host ordering take-out tofu to prepare for the visit of a kooky vegetarian. But as the state stuck to its guns and said that by the 1998 model year auto companies would have to make 2 percent of their cars "zero emission vehicles," GM got serious about the tofu and decided to make its own.

The story of General Motors and its electric car, which is now entering the market in California, is as complicated a love/hate relationship as any in the history of technology and marketing. A company that made itself into the world's largest manufacturer of the internal-combustion engine looks askance at a technology that could replace what is literally the engine of its success. On the other hand, it does not want to be left behind.

Michael Shnayerson, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Conde Nast Traveler, captures a good portion of that conflict in his new book, with a slew of in-depth interviews and some valuable insights. But the book, despite its title, isn't really about the Impact (now the EV-1), or electric cars at all, but about General Motors, which is cast in a somewhat heroic light: It met the engineering challenges not so much of inventing an electric car--that, after all, was done before the turn of the last century--but of manufacturing one by the thousands. The problem with the story as told by Shnayerson is that producing an electric car is something that a company with as many talented engineers as GM ought to be able to do. It should be like invading Grenada was for the U.S. Marines.

With California's intentions hard to read (in fact, the state eventually delayed the mandate), and with General Motors lurching from profit to loss and back, the company's Impact program was inconsistent, moving in fits and starts. Shnayerson quotes one GM executive who called the EV (electric vehicle) development program "a rogue cell hidden from the corporate immune system." We'll have to take his word for it; those within the company who wanted to kill the program do not show up in any detail in the book.

Worse, The Car That Could misses much of the context in which GM's work was done. It was an era of tremendous progress in the field, much of it outside the workshops of General Motors, and sometimes outside GM's ken, too...