company which had supplied batteries for EV1, Ovonics, had been suppressed from announcing improved batteries, with double the range, lest CARB be convinced that batteries were improving. Later, General Motors sold the supplier's majority control share to the Chevron Corporation and Cobasys. As part of the not-guilty verdict, the famed engineer Alan Cocconi explains that with laptop computer lithium-ion batteries, the EV1 could have been upgraded to a range of 300 miles per charge. He makes this point in front of his T-Zero prototype, the car that inspired the Tesla Roadster (2008). Oil companies The oil industry, through its major lobby group the Western States Petroleum Association, is brought to task for financing campaigns to kill utility efforts to build public car-charging stations. Through astroturfing groups like "Californians Against Utility Abuse", the oil-industry lobbyists posed as consumers instead of the industry interests that they actually represented. Mobil and other oil companies are also shown to be advertising directly against electric cars in national publications, even when electric cars seem to have little to do with their core business. At the end of the film, Chevron bought patents and a controlling interest in Ovonics, the advanced battery company featured in the film, ostensibly to prevent modern NiMH batteries from being used in non-hybrid electric cars. The documentary also refers to manipulation of oil prices by overseas suppliers in the 1980s as an example of the industry working to kill competition and to keep customers from moving toward alternatives to oil. Car companies With GM as its primary example, the film documents that car makers engaged in both positive and negative marketing of the electric car as its intentions toward the car and California legislation changed. In earlier days, GM ran Super Bowl commercials produced by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for the EV1. In later days it ran "award-winning" doomsday-style advertising featuring the EV1 and ran customer surveys which emphasized drawbacks to electronic vehicle technology which were not actually present in the EV1. (As a side note, CARB officials were quoted claiming that they removed their zero-emission vehicle quotas in part because they gave weight to such surveys purportedly showing no demand existing for the EV1s.) Other charges raised on GM included sabotaging their own product program, failing to produce cars to meet existing demand, and refusing to sell cars directly (they only leased them). The film also describes the history