Posts Tagged ‘cars’
“Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable”*…
A number of entrenched interests have been playing a long game. There’s (all too appropriately) a good bit of attention trained on efforts like The Federalist Society‘s attempts to remake the legal and judicial landscape and The Heritage Foundation‘s “Project 2025” plan to reshape the federal government along right-wing lines. Both reflect the careful cultivation, over decades, first of sympathetic “scholarship” and opinion, then of political action.
But as Kate Yoder of Grist explains, there’s another– longer, deeper– program at work: from the family car to the dream kitchen, fossil fuel companies have sold a vision of prosperity that depended on their own products. Over a century of evidence shows how they have done it…
What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry.
One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?”
The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.
The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.
“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
This campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels.
There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.
This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.
As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”
The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice…
Read on for the remarkable tale: “The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream,” from @grist.org.
See also: “How Big Oil Shaped America’s Parks.”
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As we look behind the curtain, we might that it was on this date in 1895 that George Selden was granted the first patent for a gasoline-powered automobile. In the patent, which Seldon had filed several years earlier, on May 8, 1879 (eight years before the public introduction of the Benz Patent Motorwagen in Europe, built in 1886 and widely considered the first automobile), he described not only the engine but also a complete automobile incorporating such features as a clutch, compressed air self-starter, and steering system (No. 549,160). He maintained that it was the combination of these elements, together with his engine, made the road-engine patentable. Selden’s day job was as a patent attorney, so he knew to delay the issue of the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others did the hard work of developing the automobile, and his patent became more valuable. Years of legal wrangling for profits followed.
“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time”*…
Photographer Maya Barkai has collected pedestrian traffic signals from around the world…
Walking Men worldwide™ is a series of public art installations, a photographic collage of pedestrian traffic icons assembled from around the world, presented in humane scale. The project was conceived as a collaborative effort of international photographers, each adding a piece to the collage… Once assembled on one canvas, these icons represent the ever-growing list of international contributors.
The subject of this project started with one of New York City’s most familiar street icons, one that repeatedly appears in the pedestrian traffic light we meet every day. As one of NYC’s most recognizable figures, the ‘walking man’ is also an international celebrity, a graphic sign that transcends all languages and places, and appears in various forms around the world as an integral part of our urban landscape.
Numerous traffic-light-characters represent the modern “Walking Men”. Standardized yet diverse, they commonly show us the correct and safe way of travel. The Walking Men Worldwide™ project explores various representations of the universally rendered ‘man’, and attempts to examine its inherent conundrum; why is it that while we all consider these icons to be topologically identical, they appear to add such a unique character to our urban identity? These two-dimensional ‘men’, omitted of all idiosyncratic detail, repeatedly reveal themselves in multiple forms on traffic lights and street signs on every corner, as this photographic collage unveils a rich and fascinating world within the confines of a coherent, multi-lingual graphic vocabulary.
What started as a series of largescale public art interventions, has evolved into an important, rare visual document on its own right. This body of work not only provides us with the first and most cohesive look into the world of human circulation, but in leading a participatory experience through a collaborative process that is rooted in the nature of documentary photography, the work has unified people through a simple yet powerful act of art; The creative process involved in my work is an example for how an artist can gather hundreds of worldwide contributors by utilizing social media as a platform, and motivate people to take part in the creation of a collage that unites them all on one canvas. In doing so, it creates a collaborative process that diminishes all political agenda, and becomes a “graphic Esperanto”…
Explore: “Walking Men Worldwide” via Kottke.org.
* Steven Wright
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As we look both ways, we might send combustible birthday greetings to Robert Bosch; he was born on this date in 1861. An engineer, inventor, and ultimately, buiness magnate, he contributed to the need for the Walking Man: he invented the spark plug and the magneto for automobiles, and founded the German conglomerate Bosch.
The final years of Bosch’s life were painful. When his company was forced to accept Nazi contracts, he had his managing staff join the Nazi party to prevent external, committed Nazi officials from attaining employment and taking over the organization. Bosch slow-walked the orders and used his company and foreign connections to foster anti-Hitler activism. Bosch worked particularly closely with his business advisor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a figure central to the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Goerdeler continued the resistance movement after Bosch’s death in 1942.
In 1937, Bosch had restructured his company as a private limited company. He established his last will and testament in which he stipulated that the earnings of the company should be allocated to a foundation devoted to charitable causes (and which received his 94 percent ownership of the company on his death). His will sketched the outlines of the corporate constitution, which was formulated by his successors and is still valid today. Bosch remains in relatively solid shape on the Brand Ledger.
“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.
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