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

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. The company, for example, continued to complain that it couldn't make its batteries perform in cold climates, while Solectria, a tiny challenger, solved the problem on the Geo Metros it was converting to electricity. It was also a period in which natural gas and methanol vehicles, once hailed as quicker, less complicated alternatives than the electric car would be, seemed to rise and then fade in the technological horse race. Some of the reasons have bearing on electrics, such as the public's perception of the future price and availability of gasoline. And it was a time that encompassed the Persian Gulf war and renewed concern about oil imports. Oil dependence is not why the Air Resources Board wanted electric vehicles, but along with carbon dioxide buildup (another problem that electric cars could ameliorate), it is a major reason that enthusiasts give for electrics. We don't read anything about these issues.

The meat of the book, the transition from a one-of-a-kind show car to a mass-produceable version, is the story of a real achievement. But we never find out if this is "The Car That Will"--sell, that is. GM went through an unprecedented marketing test for the Impact, making 50 copies and offering them free to drivers around the country, as a field test and a test of the attitudes of potential buyers. It asked them, among other things, how the car limited their driving, and how much they would be willing to pay. The book jacket assures us that Shnayerson had "unlimited access." But if he knows what the test drivers said, he does not share it with us. We don't even find out how many GM hopes to market.

Throughout the book, GM gets credit for reviving the electric car, a technology that has mostly languished since before World War I. Perhaps Shnayerson is too kind. For example, he notes that GM has also begun producing an electric version of its Chevy S-10 pickup. It would be instructive to hear of the internal debate on how GM decided to sell the Geo Metro or the S-10 to Solectria, which has been buying both and discarding their gasoline engines, transmissions, and exhaust systems to convert them to electricity. Solectria wanted GM to sell them without engines, but GM never would.

Shnayerson does give some interesting hints of GM's relationship with its closest competitors, Chrysler and Ford. On the electric car, Chrysler's approach to regulatory compliance was, loosely stated, "The dog ate my homework." Ford was more earnest but less apt, sticking to the sodium-sulfur battery, which it invented 30 years ago but hasn't made practical. To some extent GM seems to have plowed ahead simply because its Detroit brethren did so badly.

But Shnayerson misses the other side, the paradigm question, which was clearly still an open one when his story began. How would electric cars enter the market? As an offshoot of a related industry, the way Sony and Phillips, television manufacturers, moved into VCRs, or as a new industry? Can GM move into the related industry of recharging electric cars by marketing fast charging stations to shopping centers and office buildings? Has the company thought that far ahead? We still have little idea after reading this book.

Matthew L. Wald covers transportation for The New York Times.