From the department of “Yep, they said it” comes this item in today’s edition of Automotive News:

Mike Accavitti, the former head of Dodge who became American Honda’s vice president of marketing in August, describes the current luxury market as “too much machine and not enough humanity.”

Replace the phrase “the current luxury market” with “the automobile.” Does anything change?

Tom Murphy of Do the Math walks us through a topic that’s as crucial to the future of progressive, science-and-communications aided, modern society as anything could be: the comparative energy efficiency of human muscled-powered locomotion.

Corporate capitalism presumes the continuation — and, hence, the sustainability — of present mobility arrangements in at least its core areas. Under that arrangement, a large percentage of everyday, local-area travel is accomplished via automobile. This is due to the unique demand- and profit-stimulating effects (read: wastefulness) of cars-first transportation orders.

From an energy point of view, cars-first transportation means that fueling automotive engines is a major bottleneck for normal social existence. As such, the obvious question is how well does and could the cars-first arrangement compare to its major alternative, the reconstruction of towns and cities to encourage bicycling and walking?

Tom Murphy’s conclusion: On a diet of normal, mixed foodstuffs (rather than pure lard or some other means of maximizing the energy density of the comestible), short-distance bicycling yields an MPG equivalent of 290, or about 6 times the energy efficiency of a Toyota Prius. Walking, meanwhile, delivers about 160 MPG.

There is, Murphy says, one fly in the ointment here: the energy intensity of current agricultural and food delivery arrangements. Factoring that in, Murphy figures that the MPG of cycling drops to 130 and that of walking to 34.

So, even without altering the food system (via increased organic farming, localization of supply chains, moves away from food processing/packaging, improvement of the veggie/meat intake ratio, etc.), bicycles are almost four times more energy efficient than Priuses, and walking is right in the same ballpark. A blend of the two — surely a main feature of any genuinely sustainable, modern human future — would be far more energy efficient than any conceivable cars-first arrangement.

(All this, of course, leaves aside the question of the energy required to build and maintain the infrastructures involved. Cars-first requires huge streets, large parking areas, scattered building patterns, and gigantic, ornate fuel-delivery processes. Muscles-first living would imply much smaller streets, less need for parking, dense building patterns, and comparatively simple fuel-delivery processes.)

Muscles-first would, of course, also be a far healthier arrangement: Using one’s own body, rather than 3,000-pound electrical or fossil-fuel combusting machines, to achieve the desired movements, would have radically positive impacts on public health, as would the accompanying reduction in exposure to the chemicals and large collisions involved in cars-first living and breathing.

Need we mention which society would be more fun and sociable and sane?

It’s a bit cruel to pick on people who still think the Democratic Party serves a human purpose, but it’s nonetheless interesting that the Daily Kos is fully on board with the practice of publishing blatantly unfounded promises of impending physical miracles bound to rescue cars-first transportation from its own massive internal contradictions.

The latest example is from Kosnik Keith Pickering, who yesterday ran his piece, “The Edible Battery That’s Too Good for Electric Cars.” Reporting on “aqueous sodium batteries,” Pickering would have his readers join him in thinking that these items could be put into “electric” cars, save for the fact that doing so would be a waste of the batteries’ potential.

Problem? There is no existing sodium-ion battery that could be used in an automobile:

Researchers have looked into sodium-ion batteries in the past, although typically they have used high voltages and organic electrolytes. Using lower voltages reduces the amount of energy the batteries can store–a problem for electric vehicles, where space and weight are limited.

“I hope [the] DOE funds the nonaqueous [potentially usable in cars but presently non-existent] work, too,” [comments an interested professor.]

So, the proper title for Pickering’s article is “The Non-Existent Edible Battery That’s Too Good for Electric Cars.”

You know all the ads like this one, the ones that imply we live in an age of new fuels, and the task at hand is merely deciding which one is best?

Well, when it comes to cellulosic ethanol, one of the handful of major candidate “alt” fuels, guess how new that process is? Chemical engineer Robert Rapier reports:

I don’t think I have ever had the privilege of using a literature reference from 1819, but here it is. In 1819, Henri Braconnot, a French chemist, first discovered how to unlock the sugars from cellulose by treating biomass with sulfuric acid (Braconnot 1819). The technique was later used by the Germans to first commercialize cellulosic ethanol from wood in 1898 (EERE 2009).

But believe it or not, commercialization also took place in the U.S. in 1910. The Standard Alcohol Company built a cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgetown, South Carolina to process waste wood from a lumber mill (PDA 1910). Standard Alcohol later built a second plant in Fullteron, Louisiana. Each plant produced 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of ethanol per day from wood waste, and both were in production for several years (Sherrard 1945).

To put that in perspective, Iogen claimed in 2004 that they were producing the world’s first cellulose ethanol fuel from their 1,500 gallon per day plant. (While 1,500 gal/day is their announced capacity, if you look at their production statistics they have never sustained more than 500 gallons per day over the course of a year; 2008 production averaged 150 gal/day).

Many companies are in a mad rush to be the “first” to commercialize cellulosic ethanol. The next time you hear someone say that they will be the first, ask them if they plan to invent the telephone next.

As DbC has reported before, contrary to prevailing mythology, automobiles are one of the most stratified product categories in corporate capitalism’s core areas. As apologists prattle on about how cars “unite us all,” the reality is that the rich live in a different automotive universe than the rest of us.

I mention this again because, with help from the Supply-Side Bailout, makers of overclass chariots are enjoying record profits during this Great Recession.

So what are the products being delivered to the moneyed elite’s detached, heated, multi-car garages?

Here is Automotive News‘ description of the low end of the luxury market:

In the U.S., the entry-level [Mercedes] S class is a $91,850 hybrid that combines a 3.5-liter engine with an electric motor, while BMW’s base 7 series goes for $71,000 and has a standard 3.0-liter engine. Audi’s A8 comes with 4.2-liter engine and starts at $78,050.

Above that come things like Mercedes’ “$114,100 CL coupe” and “$189,600 SLS gull-wing supercar.”

How many of these monstrosities get sold each year?

Mercedes has typically been the leader at the upper end of the luxury-car market, which is crucial to its image and bottom line. Last year, the manufacturer delivered 80,000 vehicles from the S-class line, including the CL coupe and SL roadster, beating the 65,800 7-series cars sold by BMW and the 17,000 A8s by Audi, according to company figures. [source: Automotive News]

Mercedes’ “gull-wing supercar,” by the way, gets 13 mpg in the city. In a ruling class that is collectively unwilling to admit the ecological and geological limits to its insane reign, everyday life reinforces the obliviousness, as excessive wealth encourages increasingly criminal inattention to reality by elite individuals. “Let them eat MPG!,” snarl the entrepreneurs, as they cash their dividend and bailout checks.

Tom Murphy provides yet another invaluable analysis of yet another “cute solution” to the crisis of cars-first transportation. According to Murphy, here are the actual potential contributions of three ballyhooed recycling-based alternative fuel sources for automobiles:

Used restaurant cooking oil: <1 percent of current oil usage (71% of which goes into moving cars)

Recycled plastic containers: 0.5 percent of current oil usage

Reprocessed human feces: 0.25 percent of current oil usage

Murphy's conclusion:

Demonstration, or proof of concept, is often taken as enough evidence to satisfy our skeptical nature. And even if half of the things we hear about are over-hyped, we hear enough of them to placate our worries. The result is that we do not have an all-hands-on-deck effort to plot our energy future. Reliance on market forces, human ingenuity, and a track record of successful substitution short-circuits our ability to get serious.

“Market forces,” of course, are the key. Capitalists are quite unwilling to permit seriousness on this topic, despite its obvious importance and foreboding. Hence, ignorance and delusion are the only games in town.

As part of a hilariously paranoid attack on the very idea of railroads, none other than the forever grimacing George F. Will has recently tinkered a bit with the long-prevailing mainstream incantation that automobiles spring from, deliver, and secure personal freedom.

But, along the way, Will’s description of how this supposedly happens skates perilously close to an admission of the trickery and denial at the heart of prevailing doctrine:

Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy.

Will, of course, is being sarcastic here.  He contends, as must all right-thinking opinion makers, that these “delusions” are not delusions at all, but hard and enduring realities.

Nonetheless, the wording is pretty telling.  Indeed, taken out of Will’s larger obfuscatory context, they actual provide a pretty well-written and sociologically powerful description of an important dimension of reality.  Automobiles, as objects, do indeed foster delusions of independence, adequacy, and sovereignty.  They, in themselves, do indeed tend to distract attention from collective situations and decisions, if not from the outside world itself.  Never mind that shared attention to and management of collective situations and decisions is DEMOCRACY.

Of course, the great tramping elephant in the room, the ultimate thing Will labors to conceal, is exactly and precisely corporate capitalists’ constant and careful scripting, supervision, and tutoring of  the transportation choices of the American masses.  Will and other mainstream dogmatists are simply not going to acknowledge that dimension of reality, huge and unchanging as it is, no matter the circumstances.  Instead, they know their story and are sticking to it.

But, still, who knew?  George Will, closet cultural materialist!

In case you missed it, China’s state capitalists are now saying that they are pushing to be manufacturing 40 million automobiles a year by 2020.

It will be interesting to see if capitalism makes it that far without the onset of the mother of all depressions.  Personally, I doubt it.

But this news is extremely important, nonetheless.  Not only does it support the thesis that few things can boost corporate capitalism like cars, but it is also an enormous indictment of China’s worst-of-both-worlds overclass.  If their efforts come to fruition, they will spell catastrophe for the Chinese people.

The ruling ideology, distinctly including its academic manifestation, holds that automobiles are freedom machines and social equalizers. Cars-first transportation “unites [Americans] across class, racial, ethnic, and religious lines as few other aspects of our society can,” alleges Rutgers University transportation engineer James A. Dunn.

Of course, this familiar incantation is about as counter-factual as you can possibly get.

The claim, as DbC has explained before, doesn’t even hold water at the level of automotive usage. There, the rich enjoy the luxuries and choices, while the poor scrape, suffer, and go without. The distribution of cars, if one bothers to actually look at the uncontroversial facts, is one of the least equal categories of “consumer” goods.

The much more significant link between automobiles and social stratification, however, enters at the level of business ownership and the question of who benefits from selling cars. If you examine the institutional facts here, you discover that cars-first transportation is — literally — lifeblood to the investing class. Without it, the enormous privileges and prerogatives its members continue to enjoy, despite the times, would be in severe jeopardy.

If you doubt this link between cars and the upward flow of surplus wealth, consider the news that one of the major proponents of the latest, just-announced Obamian cave-in — the extension of greatly reduced estate tax rules — was none other than the National Association of Automobile Dealers. In the middle (or is it still the beginning?) of Great Depression III, you might think that NADA would favor measures to equalize income and wealth at least a little. After all, despite the inequities on the matter, it is commoners who buy most of the cars.

So why did NADA instead lobby for further extending the supply-side cap on estate taxes, a rule which overwhelmingly benefits the already-rich and, thereby, deprives the masses? As Automotive News reports:

WASHINGTON — In a victory for auto dealers and Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl, President Obama and congressional Republicans agreed on a tentative tax-cut package that would head off a huge increase in the estate tax.

The agreement yesterday, which still has to be approved by Congress, would set a maximum estate-tax rate of 35 percent for two years with an exemption of $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples.

“This (proposal) will help restore consumer confidence and speed economic recovery,” the National Automobile Dealers Association said in a statement today.

The NADA and other groups pushed for the estate-tax rate in the proposal as an alternative to the Obama administration’s plan earlier this year for a 45 percent rate with an exemption of $3.5 million per person.

The average net worth of an auto dealership was $2.2 million in 2009, according to NADA data, suggesting that most dealerships would not be subject to any estate taxes under yesterday’s proposal.

About half of all U.S. dealerships are second- and third-generation family businesses, NADA spokesman Bailey Wood said.

In other, more honest words, car dealers are capitalists, and, as such, they always place themselves first, because they can and are used to it and believe they deserve it. “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people,” as one radically misinterpreted social critic once observed of the first principle of all overclasses, clearly remains the maxim of “the masters of mankind.”

This amazing piece of short-sightedness, of course, is but the tip of the iceberg. The automotive industrial complex remains a pillar of corporate capitalism and its drive to maximize and maintain overclass wealth flows. Automobile dealerships are small potatoes inside that order. As always, across the whole system, even when its own interests are close and easy to see, today always trumps tomorrow for our self-described “entrepreneurs.”

And, in the real world, that’s cars for you: Heedlessness machines and social polarizers.

Peak oil?  Petro wars?  Climate change?  No plausible alternative energy sources?  Exploding oil rigs?  The human future?

Who needs ‘em and what of ‘em, when you’re a corporate shareholder?

It’s good times, baby, good times:

Honda

Kia/Hyundai

Hyundai

Ford

Nissan

Even, kind of:

Toyota

…and even…

GM