I'm on my way to a roundtable interview on behalf of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" a documentary about alternative-fuel vehicles, when what should I see but a Cadillac Escalade and GMC Denali parked in front of the hotel entrance.

Have I possibly stumbled upon evidence of hypocrisy from the folks who worked on this film — which Al Gore has plugged as a "perfect double-bill" for the summer, along with his own eco-doc, "An Inconvenient Truth"? Could one of these environmentally unfriendly internal-combustion behemoths belong to the green-leaning folks I'm about to meet: writer-director Chris Paine; electric-vehicle activist Chelsea Sexton; and author and energy expert Joseph J. Romm?

"No, thank God," says Sexton, who describes her own wheels as "a little bitty Saturn." Unlike Romm and Paine, who each drive a Prius, Sexton won't even touch a hybrid. (Paine, who also owns one of the few all-electric Toyota RAV4 EVs ever sold, calls the Prius his "gas guzzler.")

In a way, Sexton's decision was influenced by her frustrating experience as a salesperson for the EV1, GM's short-lived electric vehicle, and the main focus of the film. For Sexton, the refusal to jump on the hybrid bandwagon is a bit of a political statement, a protest against the attitude among the big car manufacturers that she characterizes this way: "As long as you're buying what we're building, we're not going to make anything else."

"I'd kind of like them to make something else," she says.

Sexton shares one thing in common with Paine and Romm. That's their optimism that electric vehicles, despite the finality of the film's title, will come back one day. After all, she says, "you can't kill a technology."

That day may come sooner than the car makers would like to believe, according to Romm, whose shtick in the film is debunking the much-hyped hydrogen fuel cell with what he calls the "five miracles" that the still-experimental technology needs to accomplish before it is a viable alternative. "You're not going to live to see it," he says, "and you're not going to live to buy one."

Paine also believes we'll see an electric-car comeback eventually. He wouldn't have made the movie otherwise. It's the "story" of the electric vehicle that has been "buried," he says, not the car itself. "The human spirit has a way of really rallying," he says. "Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline is going to discourage a lot of people from thinking the SUV is the ultimate answer, or six hurricanes in a row for three years in a row that wipe out parts of Florida and the South."

Maybe he's right.

In the meantime, he's hopeful that his movie, which boasts brief electric-car testimonials from Tom Hanks and (pre-arrest) Mel Gibson, will strike a chord with audiences without the star power of a public figure such as Gore at the helm. Sure, the movie's a documentary, but Paine's well aware that he has to entertain as well as inform.

In a way, then, the movie is trying to be something of a hybrid itself — not unlike the alternative-fuel cars that have all too often been, according to the filmmaker, "marginalized as being only for supergeeks and greenies."

"I hope," says Paine, "that our film can be about, like the Prius has become in the marketplace — I don't want to say re-sexualized, that's all wrong — but make it cool."