It's the kind of thing you hear over dinner every week in Detroit, but it comes as a surprise when a top executive with Toyota leans across the table to make the point.
"The movie 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' was terribly one-sided," Ernest Bastien, Toyota Motor Sales vice president for vehicle operations, said intensely. "It was not balanced at all."
We were talking in Charlotte, N.C., a couple of weeks ago. I was there to drive Toyota's new 2007 Tundra pickup, and the change in topic was completely unexpected.
If it's not surprising enough to hear Toyota defending GM, try this on for size: The film's director pretty much agrees.
"We let Toyota off the hook for how they subverted the program" to sell electric cars because GM had a higher profile, director Chris Paine told me over the phone Sunday.
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