Automobile Convention
“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” ― John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
How is convention established? All convention is a social construct, politically defined. Historically, how convention arises and evolves is a somewhat nebulously understood process. Once in place, convention is difficult to change, established convention becomes pillars of established power.
Technology has long played a significant role in establishing and defining convention. One of the last century’s most powerful new technological conventions is the automobile, reshaping much of the landscape and becoming an essential element for life in America.
As convention, the automobile upholds massive corporations, – automobile, oil, steel, and rubber — while defining conventional policy at every level of government – local, state, and federal. Automobile convention helps define larger industrial convention. However, in recent decades, concern grew with the destructive impact of industrialization, particularly in regards to ecological systems. Industrial conventionality was questioned, though not to any truly great degree. To this point, this questioning has resulted in little unconventional success, only a reshaping of the conventional. Reshaping may be a stretch, case and point electric automobiles, and its most popular representation, Tesla.
Tesla’s success was not unconventional, indeed almost completely conventional. It is not a threat to automobile convention but a continuation. Amusingly, two decades ago, one of Tesla’s founders, Martin Eberhard, said Tesla was “a car manufacturer that is also a technology company.” He's a University of Illinois engineering graduate. Tesla represents automobile and industrial convention – energy waste as wealth, the more waste, the more wealth.
Today, that great arbiter of convention, the Financial Times, runs an article titled, “Electric cars are not the future.” The best of it,
“For a city-dweller ditching a petrol car, the calculation then becomes: instead of an EV, can I buy a much cheaper, health-giving e-bike that I can charge in my flat, and supplement with the odd taxi ride? That is the trend. European and US car sales peaked in 2019. About 5.5 million e-bikes were sold in the EU in 2022, against just two million electric cars.”
“Bikes are also becoming a cultural urban norm. I see this in Paris, where only one in three households now owns a car, and cycle paths are full even in January, something that I used to be told would never happen. Bikes move faster in Paris than cars, city hall’s statistics show.
“Then there are all the other electrical options. Worldwide, according to Bloomberg, there are 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers compared with just 20 million passenger EVs. Looking back in five years, we may conclude that electric cars were made for American suburbia and for almost nowhere else.”
American suburbs are the creation of the automobile. The way to unconventionally reform transportation in the suburbs is to restructure the automobile infrastructure, redistributing life – eating, shopping, schooling, and business – from its automobile created concentration.
TSLA went down almost 2% today. The FT arbitrates the unconventional? But then TSLA is down almost 50% in two years and if the financial system was any measure of value, it’d be down a lot, lot more. Reading Keynes, what worth conventional finance has in valuing has long been a matter of debate, no more so than today. It has no ability to value the unconventional. Certainly, it would be best for all if TSLA's stock keeps heading down, hopefully removing Elon from occupying his far too prominent position failing to conventionally define the future.
Like all creation of convention, how technology is adopted is a social process, still rather ill-defined and unsophisticated. For example, the sophistication of industrialism’s use of energy is analogous to the sophistication of using a club. If we're going to succeed unconventionally, and at this point it’s the only way possible, we’ll need to majorly reconfigure conventional values and harshly repudiate conventional failing, instead of, as we presently do, rewarding it to a historically unprecedented degree.