A decade ago, Chris Paine was just a guy who happened to love his electric car. He and about 800 other Californians made up the first wave of pioneer-consumers who leased battery-powered vehicles from General Motors, Ford, Toyota and a handful of other companies in the full expectation that this was the future. The car companies, spurred on by tough Californian anti-pollution regulations, had been working on alternatives to the traditional internal combustion engine since about 1990, and several environmentally conscious Californian cities had joined in the effort by installing recharging stations at supermarkets and in car parks. But then, as the new millennium arrived and US dependence on foreign oil became a hot political issues, something weird happened. The car companies who’d leased out electric vehicles began demanding them back. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Paine, an internet entrepreneur who had also dabbled in film-making, knew something was up when he took his General Motors EV1 to a specialist car dealership in Los Angeles for a routine tyre rotation in early 2003. When he called to see if his car was ready, he was told he was never going to see it again. […]