General Motors now offers to sell you a partially electric-motored car for $41,000. Nissan will sell you an all-electric one for $32,780.

If you are among the few who could even think about forking over that much money for an automobile, here are four questions about what you’re buying:

1) Isn’t it ostrichware? As the smug owner of the Prius pictured at left shouts through his/her vanity plate, isn’t your main motivation for buying a Volt or a Leaf (and Big Brother must be laughing his ass off at that name for an automobile!) to make yourself feel that you’ve thereby done your part to help confront and reform the institutions that are imperiling humanity’s energy and ecological future? And isn’t that a rather pathetic conclusion to draw? Buying a 3,500-pound box of steel, plastic, and lithium is somehow a serious contribution to making a sustainable world? Really?

2) Are you sure it’s not vaporware? The outgoing CEO of GM once said he knew GM “had to have an electric car,” and, by that, he meant he knew it was an important gesture to show that General Motors is changing. No serious analyst of electric cars thinks they will comprise more than ten percent of the U.S. vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. In fact, it isn’t at all proven that they even could, given their radical demands on our decrepit electricity-transmission infrastructure. So, have you asked yourself whether, by buying an electric car, you might actually be volunteering to serve as a useful rolling distraction on behalf of our corporate overlords, whose intent is to ride cars-first transportation for as long as they possibly can?

3) Where’s your theory of transition? It is inherently un-serious to presume that an individual purchase of any product — not to say a two-ton grocery-fetcher — equals a real contribution to getting humanity decently and humanely across the coming energy transition. No proponent of the electric car ever talks about this, for the excellent reason that cars-first transportation is simply not even imaginably sane, given what we’re up against.

4) Who will fix your crashed Volt or Leaf? What will happen when your battery pack sheers off your frame in a rear-ender? How much will you have to pay to insure against that event and others like it?

What may be the latest industry-wide/technologically-inherent safety cover-up in the auto industry is being pinned exclusively on Toyota by the powers-that-be.  Having just bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, U.S. overclass political and media entrepreneurs are almost certainly trying to add a bit of Japan-bashing to their efforts to revive a dying and massively dangerous capitalist pipe-dream.

The scandal in question, of course, is random runaway acceleration in new-make automobiles.

There are two possible explanations for why Toyota is taking the heat:

1. “This is Toyota’s Firestone”:   Toyota either made a mistake, or its manufacturing standards are worse than its peers’ standards;

or

2. This is bigger and deeper than Toyota:  Toyota is the leader in moving toward hybrid and all-electric cars, in which very large on-board batteries provide some or all of the vehicle’s engine power, and there’s an unacknowledged flaw in schemes to electrify cars.

Beginning at BMW in the late 1980s, more and more cars have incorporated Electronic Throttle Control (ETC), or “drive-by-wire.”  With ETC, the commands transmitted to the engine throttle from the gas pedal are no longer mechanical cables, but electronic signals from a computer that arrive via a data “wire.”  Hence, “drive-by-wire.”

Beginning about a decade ago, sensing the onset of peak oil, the car corporations started getting serious about making hybrid and all-electric cars.  Toyota was and still is far out in front of this movement.

So, is ETC an inherently dangerous technology?

And is the flaw in ETC being compounded by the move toward hybrids and all-electrics?  The potential problem here is that the huge batteries in hybrid and all-electric cars emit some serious electro-magnetic intereference fields.  Are these fields prone to disturbing the “drive-by-wire” commands flowing between the new cars’ gas-pedal and engine-throttle computers, thereby compounding the flaws inherent in ETC?

There are three ways to test this hypothesis:

1. Is there evidence of an ETC (as opposed to mere mechanical issues with pedals or floor mats) problem in known runaway-car incidents?

2. Are hybrids more prone to runaway acceleration than all-petro cars?

3. Is Toyota the only maker that has runaway-car problems?

On the first question, here is a good summary of what’s known.

Especially telling, in my humble opinion, is this summary’s report that there may be a cover-up of this issue being managed by the Orwellianly-named National Highway Safety Traffic Administration:

An electronic cause [of runaway acceleration] is championed by Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Nader-inspired Center for Auto Safety, who dispatched a Freedom of Information Act request to NHTSA in search of documents on its investigation. Examining that data, he said it appears that the agency’s work amounts to less than the thorough investigation cited by the official.

On the second question, another expert blogger reports:

Meantime, another federal official close to safety regulators says NHTSA is investigating whether electromagnetic interference (EMI) could be causing glitches with vehicle speed controls in all cars and trucks, including Toyota products.   A Wayne State University engineering professor who consults with the industry believes cell phone signals, radar pulses, and other ambient electrical static, could be causing the problem.   USA Today reports a British expert on EMI believes the pulses are a “likely cause” of some of Toyota’s acceleration problems.   It is the basis of two class action lawsuits against the automaker.

Toyota dismisses the allegations, saying late Tuesday: “After many years of exhaustive testing — by us and other outside agencies — we have found no evidence of a problem with our electronic throttle control system that could have caused unwanted acceleration. Our vehicles go through extensive electromagnetic radiation testing dynamically.”   Engineers have studied this since the 1970’s but have never conclusively linked the issue to a specific problem.

Nevertheless, a guy who knows a little about computers, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, says his Prius is having runaway acceleration problems.

As to the third question, Toyota is not the only maker with runaway issues.

Even more telling, again to my own eye, is this:

Feds ponder brake overrides on all cars to stop runaway acceleration

So, the jury is still out on all this.  But it is hardly clear that the official story — the inexplicable return of shoddy Japanese manufacturing — is the proper verdict.

Meanwhile, there is a whole other sense in which the phrase “runaway cars” is exactly the right story we need to track.  Can humanity survive this make-or-break century without ending our insane reliance on automobiles for everyday movement?  Stay tuned…

Contrary to both corporate capitalist marketing efforts and one important stream of very harmful and very half-baked mythology, to the extent they aren’t merely a piece of distracting vaporware, electric cars are a major nightmare, not a suppressed panacea.

Consider this news from the IEEE:

EVs need lots of power, especially when charged quickly. Utilities bet that most buyers will want a 240-volt charger that can “fill the tank” of a modest-size EV in 2 to 3 hours, four times as fast as a standard 120-V charger can. Such “AC Level 2″ chargers, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers’ emerging J1772 standard, draw up to 6.6 kilowatts. Turning one on is like adding up to three homes to a neighborhood, and that’s with the air conditioning, lights, and laundry running.

Turning on two or three Level 2 chargers could burn out the street-level transformers that are the distribution grid’s weakest link. Most utilities employ undersized transformers, which are designed to cool overnight. Without time to cool, sustained excess current will eventually cook a transformer’s copper windings, causing a short and blacking out the local loads it serves.

As the wonderful Dmitry Orlov notes, our economic masters know only one answer to the problems their rule generates: boondoggles, or, in Orlov’s words, “solutions to problems that result in more severe problems than those they attempt to solve.”

Sustained maximum profit-making requires cars-first transportation, so we are going to get more of it, the planet and us human be damned…

According to the corporate media, the Obama administration, and the usual crowd of half-informed conspiracy theorists and technophiles, “plug-in” electric cars are both possible and almost here as a viable automotive fleet-replacement technology.

Alas, the laws of physics, which enforce a rather strict connection between an object’s mass and the amount of energy it takes to move it, seem to continue to govern the universe, despite fervent contrary wishes.

Introduced as a concept car in early 2007, the ballyhooed Chevy Volt, to name one telling example, remains a mere industrial experiment.

And, meanwhile, here are the findings of a January 7 research report from the Boston Consulting Group:

DETROIT, January 7, 2010—Although electric-car battery costs are expected to fall sharply over the coming decade, they are unlikely to drop enough to spark widespread adoption of  fully electric vehicles without a major breakthrough in battery technology, according to a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The study, released today, concludes that the long-term cost target used by many carmakers in planning their future fleets of electric cars—$250 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)—is unlikely to be achieved unless there is a major breakthrough in battery chemistry that substantially increases the energy a battery can store without signifi-cantly increasing the cost of either battery materials or the manufacturing process.

“Given current technology options, we see substantial challenges to achieving this goal by 2020,” said Xavier Mosquet, Detroit-based leader of BCG’s global automotive practice and a coauthor of the study. “For years, people have been saying that one of the keys to reducing our dependency on fossil fuels is the electrification of the vehicle fleet. The reality is, electric-car batteries are both too expensive and too technologically limited for this to happen in the foreseeable future.”

Most electric cars in the new decade will use lithium-ion batteries, which are lighter and more powerful than the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries used today in hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Citing the current cost of similar lithium-ion batteries used in consumer electronics (about $250 to $400 per kWh), many original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) hope that the cost of an automotive lithium-ion battery pack will fall from its current price of between $1,000 and 1,200 per kWh to between $250 and $500 per kWh at scaled production. BCG, however, points out that consumer batteries are simpler than car batteries and must meet significantly less demanding requirements, especially regarding safety and life span. So actual battery costs will likely be higher than what carmakers predict.

Interestingly, these facts are almost certainly well-known to the overseers of the remaining auto corporations.  For instance, the fresh-faced change agent Ed Whitacre, GM’s “new” CEO, seems appropriately jaded:  “I know we have to have an electric car.” Hardly the statement of somebody about to unleash a new epoch-making invention!

Also of note is the corporate media’s predictable mis-reporting of the source of “the challenge” underlying the electric car conversion fantasy.  In The Washington Post‘s telling, a reporter with the Dickensianly perfect name of Peter Whoriskey would have it this way:

But overshadowing prospects for the transition of the vast U.S. auto fleet to electric — and the billions of dollars the automakers have invested in the switch — is the question of whether anyone beyond a sliver of enthusiasts will soon embrace the newfangled cars, which force drivers to rethink their habits and expectations of convenience.

This, of course, fits the standard ideology, in which automobiles come from Joe Sixpack and Joe Sixpack only, no capitalists involved — so all problems return to the humble Sixpack doorstep, not the needs and dictates of the corporate overclass.

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