Posts Tagged ‘cars’
“These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of”*…
Ryan McManus on geologic byproducts, American automotive lore, and the hidden beauty of the industrial age…
Let’s be real for a second: gems are basically very pretty garbage. A byproduct of a geologic or biological process we hang on our bodies for some weird reason. Diamonds are just charcoal that has been squeezed a little longer than usual. Geodes are dried lava that got a little wet. Pearls? Oyster mucus, secreted to smooth out the bivalve equivalent of a stone in one’s shoe. They are unintentional, accidental and, due to the peculiarities of our brains, unquestionably beautiful.
So, if nature can accidentally create works of art while going about its business, why not us?
In the 1940s and 50s, Detroit’s automotive factories had a beautifully messy problem: paint. Workers hand-sprayed enamel paint onto cars on assembly lines, with excess overspray gradually building up on the tracks, skids, and walls of painting bays. This oversprayed paint accumulated over years, layer by layer—creating thick, multicolored deposits that factory workers would periodically chip away and discard.
What they were throwing out, however, would eventually become one of the most sought-after materials in contemporary jewelry making: Fordite, also known as Detroit agate.
Fordite is a man-made gemstone (technically a non-faceted gemstone, called a cabochan), but not like the rubies and diamonds grown in labs. The material represents a fascinating intersection of industrial inefficiency and geological mimicry: As cars were spray painted by hand, the hardened enamel paint built up and baked, creating sedimentary-like layers that mirror how natural agates form over millennia, except compressed into decades of automotive production.
When cut and polished, the visual result is striking—especially in the most valuable samples from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period of bright “high impact” colors like Ford’s Grabber Blue or Mopar’s Plum Crazy purple. Fordite reveals psychedelic swirls and bands that chronicle automotive color trends year by year, strata by strata: It’s essentially a cross-section of American car culture, with each stratum representing a different model year’s palette. Like the proverbial Jurassic Age mosquito trapped in the stone of amber, the DNA of a bygone epoch is hidden inside.
But Fordite’s deeper appeal lies in its accidental scarcity and temporal specificity. By the 1980s, car manufacturers had moved away from hand-spray painting, adopting an electrostatic process that magnetizes enamels to car bodies, leaving little to no overspray. Efficient, yes—but this electrostatic process ended Fordite production in abundance by the late 1970s. The material can never be recreated—it’s a finite byproduct of a particular moment in industrial history.
This creates a curious value proposition: Fordite is valuable precisely because modern manufacturing has become more efficient. It is industrial waste transformed into luxury material through the simple passage of time and technological progress. With the old factories long gone and today’s automated systems eliminating waste, each piece of Fordite becomes increasingly rare (and expensive), turning Detroit’s former inefficiency into today’s artisanal treasure.
In an age of planned obsolescence and disposable manufacturing, Fordite stands as an accidental monument to the beauty that emerges from industrial imperfection—proof that sometimes the most interesting materials come from processes we’ve intentionally left behind.
A better poet might even see Fordite as metaphor for the City of Detroit itself—forever tied to the automobile, often written off as worthless; unrecognized as a thing of curious quality and glorious beauty waiting for its moment…
More beautiful examples at “Fordite,” from @ryantomorrow.bsky.social in the always-illuminating Why is This Interesting?
* George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
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As we rethink remnants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that America’s first fatal automobile accident occurred. At West 74th Street and Central Park West in New York City, Henry Hale Bliss, a 69-year-old local real estate dealer, stepped off of a south bound 8th Avenue trolley car and was struck by the driver of an electric-powered taxicab (Automobile No. 43). Bliss hit the pavement, crushing his head and chest. He was taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital, but upon arrival the house surgeon, Dr. Marny, judged his injuries too severe to survive. Bliss died the next morning.
“The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so”*…
From Kai Brach, in his nifty newsletter Dense Discovery, an appreciation of an Isaac Asimov essay from 1988: “The Relativity of Wrong” (a lovely riff on a point also taken up by Karl Popper)…
… it’s a welcome dose of nuance in this era of absolutist thinking. When knowingness tricks our brains into certainty, Asimov’s wonderfully nerdy piece demonstrates that right and wrong are far less binary than we may think.
The piece begins with Asimov addressing a young English literature student who’d written to scold him for his scientific arrogance. The student argues that every generation thinks they’ve got it sorted, and every generation gets proven wrong. Therefore, our current knowledge is just as flawed as flat-earth theory. But Asimov won’t have it:
“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
He then makes his point clear through a series of delightful examples. Like spelling:
“How do you spell ‘sugar’? Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is wronger than Genevieve? For that matter, I think it is possible to argue that Genevieve’s spelling is superior to the ‘right’ one. Or suppose you spell ‘sugar’: s-u-c-r-o-s-e, or C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Strictly speaking, you are wrong each time, but you’re displaying a certain knowledge of the subject beyond conventional spelling.”
The same logic applies to mathematics: “Suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an integer. You’d be right, wouldn’t you? Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an even integer. You’d be righter. Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = 3.999. Wouldn’t you be nearly right?”
The flat-earth idea is a great (and again timely?) case study for Asimov’s theory. The notion that the earth was flat wasn’t the product of ancient stupidity but reasonable observation given the tools available. The earth’s actual curvature is roughly 0.000126 per mile – practically indistinguishable from zero without sophisticated instruments.
“So although the flat-Earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favour of the spherical-Earth theory.”
What he’s really arguing for is intellectual humility. Scientific theories don’t flip-flop wildly from flat earth to cubic earth to doughnut-shaped earth. Instead:
“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
We seem to live in a world of zero-sum thinking, where nuance often gets steamrolled by the satisfying simplicity of being right. I want to remember Asimov’s framework the next time I’m certain someone else is wrong – that most disagreements aren’t between absolute truth and utter falsehood, but between different degrees of incompleteness…
On the dangers of “knowingness” and absolutism: Isaac Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong,” from @densediscovery.bsky.social.
Asimov’s essay is here.
See also: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement” and “The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances.”
(Image above: source)
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As we rethink, we might recall that this date in 1957 was “E Day,” the introduction of the Edsel automobile. Name for Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry Ford, Edsels were developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand (beyond Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln) to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. It was the first new brand introduction by an American automaker since the 1939 launch of Mercury and 1956 launch of Continental (which ended and merged into Lincoln after 1957).
Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, unattractive, distinguished by a vertical grille said to resemble a horse collar, and low quality.
No automobile has been so widely anticipated nor so quickly rejected as the Ford Edsel (with the possible recent exception of the Tesla Cybertruck). Within two months of its highly publicized launch, the Edsel became a rolling joke– and has stood as a metphor for disastrous product launch failures since.
Recognizing this (and following a loss of over $250 million [equivalent to $2.66 billion in 2024 dollars] on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line), Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand before 1960.
“I know a lot about cars, man. I can look at any car’s headlights and tell you exactly which way it’s coming”*…
… too often, it’s coming for us…
Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.
– Source
Of course, retail rampages are the least of our automotive worries. In the last several years– after decades of decline, and unlike other developed countries– vehicle deaths in the U.S. begin to grow (gift article).
While there are a number of factors at work, an extraordinary piece in The Economist homes in one of the most salient: Americans love big cars, but heavy vehicles kill more people than they save…
For all the safety features available in cars today to help them avoid crashes, the laws of physics are cruel. When two vehicles collide, it is usually the heavier one that prevails. This advantage has changed little over time. Thirty years ago when a passenger car crashed with a pickup truck or sport-utility vehicle (SUV), the driver of the car was roughly four times as likely to die; today this driver dies around three times as often. Critics say this is too high a price to pay for roomier interiors and more powerful engines. Carmakers insist they are giving consumers what they want. An analysis by The Economist shows that weight remains a critical factor in car crashes in America. Reining in the heaviest vehicles would save lives…
… Over the years policymakers struggled to solve this mismatch, or “incompatibility”, problem. Often, they made things worse. When Congress set fuel-efficiency standards in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, cars were swiftly downsized. Within ten years cars shed 1,000lb; trucks dropped 500lb. Although these changes saved motorists money at the pump, they also led to more traffic fatalities. A paper published in 1989 by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the shift towards smaller, lighter cars in the 1970s and 1980s boosted fatalities by 14-27%. A report released in 2002 by America’s National Research Council concluded that the downsizing of America’s fleet led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
As cars got bigger, regulators shifted their focus from the lightest vehicles to the heaviest ones. The impetus for this was the rise of SUVs. Between 1990 and 2005 the market share of such vehicles in America grew from 6% to 26%, pushing up the weight of an average new car from 3,400lb to nearly 4,100lb. As suburban soccer moms traded in their station wagons for Ford Expeditions, many felt safer. And they were right. “One of the reasons the roads are much safer is because vehicles… [are] bigger and they’re heavier than they were,” Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an industry research organisation, told conference-goers in 2011. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, even advocated supersizing America’s fleet to improve safety, writing in the Wall Street Journal that large vehicles are “the solution, not the problem”.
But researchers quickly learned that the extra protection provided by heavier vehicles comes at the expense of others on the road. In a paper published in 2004 Michelle White of the University of California, San Diego estimated that for every deadly crash avoided by an SUV or pickup truck, there were an additional 4.3 among other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Another paper in 2012 by Shanjun Li of Resources for the Future, a think-tank, estimated that when a car crashes with an SUV or pickup, rather than another car, the driver’s fatality rate increased by 31%. In 2014 Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley estimated that when two cars crash, a 1,000lb increase in the weight of one vehicle raised the fatality rate in the other by 47%.
Researchers also found that the safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns. This means that, once vehicles reach a certain weight, packing on more pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. e pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. “At some point heavy vehicles cost more lives…than they save,” wrote Brian O’Neill and Sergey Kyrychenko of the IIHS in 2004. This makes intuitive sense, says Mr Anderson of Berkeley. “Once you outweigh the other guy by a factor of two times, is adding 200 pounds more really going to make a difference for you? Probably not. But it’ll make sure that he gets completely destroyed.”…
…
… Regulators are ill-equipped to fix the problem. America’s tax system subsidises heavier vehicles by setting more lenient fuel-efficiency standards for light trucks, and allowing bosses who purchase heavy-duty vehicles for business purposes to deduct part of the cost from their taxable income. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), America’s top auto-safety agency, uses a five-star rating system to score crash performance, but only takes account of the safety of the occupants of the vehicle in question, not that of other drivers. “Our rating system reflects a bias towards the occupant,” explains Laura Sandt of the Highway Safety Research Centre at the University of North Carolina, “it is not designed to rate the car in terms of its holistic safety effects.” The NHTSA declined to comment on The Economist’s findings.
There are signs that Americans may be wising up. A survey conducted last year by YouGov, a pollster, found that 41% of Americans think that SUVs and pickup trucks have become too big; 49% said such vehicles are more dangerous for other cars and 50% said they endanger cyclists and pedestrians. Researchers are raising the alarm. Since 1989 the IIHS has regularly published the driver-fatality rates of popular car models. In 2023, for the first time, the group also estimated the rate at which cars kill drivers in other vehicles. Policymakers are starting to take notice too. “I’m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a speech last year.
But the odds that carmakers curb their heaviest, most dangerous vehicles are slim. American car-buyers value safety, but mainly for themselves, not society as a whole. And although regulators are tasked with protecting consumers, they rarely do so at the expense of choice, no matter how deadly the consequences. “There may be a certain point where you say, ‘You know what, passenger vehicles shouldn’t be weighing this much,’” says Raul Arbelaez of the IIHS’s Vehicle Research Centre. “But it would, politically, be really hard to gain any momentum on that.” Finally the shift towards electric power is likely to increase their weight further, as battery-powered vehicles tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents.
“Manufacturers are playing by the book,” says Mark Chung of the National Safety Council, a non-profit. “They’re making a business decision, and it’s a rational decision. Unless they’re forced to think differently, they’re not going to. So I think this is where our federal partners really need to step up.”…
From the annals of auto safety– when big is bad: “Too Much of a Good Thing,” in @TheEconomist.
See also: “Why American cars are so big” (gift article).
* Mitch Hedberg
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As we downsize, we might recall that on this date in 1982 Knight Rider premiered on television. The show starred David Hasselhoff as crime fighter Michael Knight who drove a customized car– a supercomputer/AI on wheels– named K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand). K.I.T.T. was designed by Michael Scheffe (a designer who had worked on toys for Mattel and on Bladerunner) using Pontiac’s 1982 Trans Am; in the event, he had 18 days to create his first mock up of K.I.T.T. for the network.
The original Knight Rider (1982–1986) and sequel series Team Knight Rider (1997–1998) and Knight Rider (2008–2009) spawned three television films, computer and video games, and novels, as well as KnightCon, a Knight Rider convention.
“The American really loves nothing but his automobile”*…
FT correspondent John Burn-Murdoch on America’s infatuation with large personal vehicles, and its consequences…
For all the grim tales of guns and opioids, the thing that really hits you as a visitor to the US these days is the cars. Literally, for too many people. In 2021, road fatalities were the second leading cause of death among Americans aged under 45, ahead of Covid-19, suicides and gun violence.
On a visit to the US last month, three things made a strong impression: the sheer size of the cars; the relative lack of electric models with their characteristic hum; and speed limits that seem entirely optional. All, I think, stem from the same underlying tendency: to see driving as an expression of personal freedom.
To an extent, a similar dynamic plays out the world over. Just look at the furor that has accompanied recent schemes to curb residential traffic in the UK. But, when it comes to vehicles, the US really is exceptional.
The average new American car purchased in 2021 weighed 1.94 tonnes, fully half a tonne more than the European average. Purchases of SUVs and “light” trucks together now account for four out of every five new vehicles bought in the US, up from one in five 50 years ago…
… This would all be a mere curiosity except that these vehicles have a variety of lethal qualities. As American cars have bulked up, the number of fatalities for the drivers and passengers inside these rolling fortresses has fallen by 22 per cent. But the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 57 per cent. According to an estimate by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, the lives of 8,000 pedestrians could have been saved between 2000 and 2018 if Americans had stuck to smaller vehicles.
For many inside the cars, too, the association of individualism with driving proves lethal. Almost one in 10 drivers and passengers in the front seat of US cars do not wear a seatbelt, and 45 per cent say they often drive at least 15 miles per hour above the speed limit on motorways. In the UK, both measures are way lower, at 3 per cent.
The grim result is that half of the car occupants killed in the US in 2020 were not wearing seatbelts vs 23 per cent in the UK. Speeding is implicated in 30 per cent of fatal crashes in the US but just half of that in Britain. All told, 43,000 people died on America’s roads in 2021, the highest mortality rate in the developed world by some margin. By my calculations, a fifth of those could be averted every year if rates of speeding and seatbelt-wearing matched peer countries.
Finally, there’s the environmental impact. Less than 5 per cent of new US cars last year were either partly or fully electric, compared with 17 per cent in Europe (rising to 86 per cent in Norway). As a result, the average new US car emits twice as much carbon dioxide per mile as its European counterpart, all while carrying the same number of occupants as in the UK — 1.5 people per trip, weighted for distance driven…
When bigger isn’t better: “America’s obsession with big cars has fatal consequences” (gift article), from @jburnmurdoch in @FT.
See item #2 in this post from @Noahpinion for a gentle critique of Burn-Murdoch’s charts, resulting in a (slightly) more positive take on U.S. road safety… though it seems to your correspondent that Burn-Murdoch’s fundamental point still hold.
* William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
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As we scale back, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that President Ronald Reagan issued Proclamation 5457, designating 1986 the Centennial Year of the Gasoline Powered Automobile.
“The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel, and cement; in that order and that hierarchy”*…
… problematically, the last of those is among the biggest sources of CO2 emissions on earth– between 7 and 8% of the total. Now, Casey Crownheart reports, there may be a way to produce that essential building material in a low- or no-carbon way…
Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But there’s a climate threat lurking in those ubiquitous gray slabs. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills.
Humans have been making cement, in one form or another, for thousands of years. Ancient Romans used volcanic ash, crushed lime, and seawater to build the aqueducts and iconic structures like the Pantheon. The modern version of hydraulic cement—the sort that hardens when mixed with water and allowed to dry—dates back to the early 19th century. Derived from widely available materials, it’s cheap and easy to make. Today, cement is one of the most-used materials on the planet, with about 4 billion metric tons produced annually.
Industrial-scale cement is a multifaceted climate conundrum. Making it is energy intensive: the inside of a traditional cement kiln is hotter than lava in an erupting volcano. Reaching those temperatures typically requires burning fossil fuels like coal. There’s also a specific set of chemical reactions needed to turn crushed-up minerals into cement—and those reactions release carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
One solution to this climate catastrophe might be coursing through the pipes at Sublime Systems. Founded by two MIT battery scientists, the startup is developing an entirely new way to make cement. Instead of heating crushed-up rocks in lava-hot kilns, Sublime’s technology zaps them in water with electricity, kicking off chemical reactions that form the main ingredients in its cement.
Over the course of the past several years, the startup has gone from making batches of cement that could fit in the palm of your hand to starting up a pilot facility that can produce around 100 tons each year. While it’s still tiny compared with traditional cement plants, which can churn out a million tons or more annually, the pilot line represents the first crucial step to proving that electrochemistry can stand up to the challenge of producing one of the world’s most important building materials.
By the end of the decade, Sublime plans to have a full-scale manufacturing facility up and running that’s capable of producing a million tons of material each year. But traditional large-scale cement plants can cost over a billion dollars to build and outfit. Competing with established industry players will require Sublime to scale fast while raising the additional funding it will need to support that growth. The end of 0% interest rates makes such a task increasingly difficult for any business, but especially for one producing a commodity like cement. And in a high-stakes, low-margin industry like construction, Sublime will need to persuade builders to use its material in the first place…
A start-up is working to drive down the carbon footprint of cement production: “How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain,” from @casey_crownhart in @techreview.
See also: “We are closing in on zero-carbon cement.”
* Le Corbusier
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As we prioritize progress, we might note that it was on this date in 1942 that Henry Ford patented the Soybean car. Per Wikipedia:
… a concept car built with agricultural plastic. The New York Times in 1941 states the car body and fenders were made from a strong material derived from soy beans, wheat and corn. One article claims that they were made from a chemical formula that, among many other ingredients, included soy beans, wheat, hemp, flax and ramie; while the man who was instrumental in creating the car, Lowell E. Overly, claims it was “…soybean fiber in a phenolic resin with formaldehyde used in the impregnation” (Davis, 51). The body was lighter and therefore more fuel efficient than a normal metal body. It was made in Dearborn, Michigan and was introduced to public view on August 13, 1941. It was made, in part, as a hedge against the rationing of steel during World War II. It was designed to run on hemp fuel.
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