American Car Culture

Here the hero came with the head that shocked a royal house
Turning king and all into stone
It was long long ago, if time means anything
Long, long ago - Pindar

Well sometimes you just gotsta take what you can get. Having, for much much longer than I care to admit, attempted to at least get a conversation going concerning American culture, the CEO of Ford says,

“We have to start to get back in love with smaller vehicles. It’s super important for our society and for EV adoption. We are just in love with these monster vehicles, and I love them too, but it’s a major issue with weight.”

Phew, there’s so much wrong with this statement, but at very least, make no mistake it is the very least, the notion of smaller cars is one to be applauded. Americans were never in love with smaller vehicles. If you’re unfortunate enough to have been around in the 70s and the first “Oil Shock,” you remember a brief push toward smaller vehicles. However at that point, Detroit didn’t make many small cars, Japan did. Detroit had to be led by the nose to build small cars.

Then came the Reagan Revolution and there was no more oil problem. We’d spend even more on the military so in the next few decades we could insure global oil supplies by blowing up the Middle East. Worst, at the end of the 80s, Detroit realized it was more profitable to build big vehicles such as SUVs and pickups, spending billions in advertising manufacturing a new big vehicle culture.

The key here, as the Ford CEO points out, is weight, that’s Newton’s Second Law of Motion — force = mass x acceleration. Simply, the more weight, the more energy you to need to move it. So, if you encase 180 pound person in 4000 pound vehicles, 96% of the energy is used to move the car, not the person.

The other unfortunate thing is Ford’s CEO statement is made in regards to electrifying American car culture and that ain’t going to happen. “As per a new study titled "Copper mining and vehicle electrification" by Cornell professor Lawrence M. Cathles and University of Michigan Earth & Environmental Sciences professor Adam Simon, copper cannot be mined quickly enough to make the wires and other components needed to fulfill the current goals toward renewable energy.”

That’s just the copper, not to mention the new energy for compute technologies being demanded by our Tech titans, who seek an even greater centralized compute infrastructure under the marketing slogan AI, an infrastructure that will become increasingly unstable as demonstrated by last week’s World-Wide-Blueout.

The clue here is to think about being smarter about energy, starting with an understanding the least energy intensive way to move an individual is to walk, then to bike, and then collective transit, opening a universe of new possibilities for the world we live.