It’s an interesting proposition. Getting rid of cars period would be a huge leap in changing our sense of consciousness. The debate has been quarantined and hi-jacked by discussion about national security and ecology, but smaller and more fuel efficient cars, electric vehicles, can actually contribute to worsening the problems they ostensibly are supposed to deal with by spinning the market wheel of consumption, increasing obsolescence and reinforcing existing social structures based on the symbolic and economic pretenses of the car. In other words, it’s still a stupid car. The hybrid and electric vehicles are actually more damaging to the environment than traditional construction, and are more of a status symbol and guilt washing, trendy movement than engaging in a real discussion of improving quality of life. This is a good point:
I always said small diesel automobiles are the future…not hybrids, not electric cars. With his new model B-Max manufactured in Craiova – Romania, Ford is now the leader of the PRACTICAL fuel efficient automobile manufacturers. I wrote “PRACTICAL” in capital letters in order to emphasize the fact that this vehicle has no need to be plugged in an electrical outlet, it doesn’t catch fire because of its on-board batteries, has an effective range of 370+ miles on a tank of fuel and doesn’t need expensive Li-Ion battery exchanges every couple of years.Read More:http://transsylvaniaphoenix.blogspot.ca/
—So on a recent Friday when demonstrators blocked the Fell Street entrances to the station for a fourth consecutive week in protest of both BP and the cycling hazard, many drivers slowed and tooted their horns in support.
But instead of showing appreciation, some protesters responded with vitriol. “Where’s your bike?” they shouted back.
“People have to be motivated and give up some of these comforts,” said Janel Sterbentz, a 32-year-old demonstrator from San Jose who said she had never owned a car.
The gulf spill, and the attention it has focused on the United States’ oil dependency, is seen by some as an opportunity to push the environmental movement further — beyond merely green, mass transit first, or pro-cycling.
For some, the mission now is anti-car.—Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09bcjames.html image:http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/1998/a-car-free-london-ideas-competition
But again, its still a variation on car culture. Public transportation is a necessary reality; a system for all classes. Yves Engler in his book makes a radical( see link at end)…Perhaps the strongest evidence of Ford’s production intentions comes from the B-Max concept’s distinct paucity of show-car whiz-bang on the outside. With the exception of the B-pillarless aperture, the styling is utterly unsurprising—in a good way. Ford’s “Kinetic” styling works very well on small cars, and the B-Max is handsome. Its doors will make news: With the front doors swung open and the rears slid back, the B-Max presents a near five-foot-wide opening, a genuine boon to practicality and one that “has already been engineered for production.” Meeting side-impact safety standards is the greatest hurdle to putting pillarless designs in series models, but the B-Max features what Ford is calling the “integrated B-pillar” door concept. It includes structural reinforcements within each of the four doors, and they work with beefed-up door frames and other structural enhancements in the body to provide protection. Ford claims that the result is the same level of crashworthiness found in “other Ford products with a more conventional structure.”
—Reclaim the Streets (RTS) began as creative activist group in London, but its tactics, blending party and protest, soon spread around the world. Merging the direct action of Britain’s anti-road building movement and the carnivalesque nature of the counter-cultural rave scene, RTS became a catalyst for the global anti-capitalist movements of the late ’90s.
RTS saw the streets as the urban equivalent of the commons see THEORY: The commons, in need of reclaiming from the enclosures of the car and commerce and transformed into truly public places to be enjoyed by all. RTS became most known for its street parties, which served not only as a protest vehicle against car culture but also as a prefigurative vision of what city streets could be in a system that prioritized people over profit and ecology over the economy—Read More:http://beautifultrouble.org/case/reclaim-the-streets/ image:http://jcrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/first-superman-comic-saves-familys-home/
While the B-Max concept’s exterior appears totally production-ready, the leather-lined black and bronze interior—complete with stitched-leather door and dash uppers and a floor of woven black leather with bronze highlights—is decidedly showy. The B-Max also features a panoramic glass roof, as well as Ford’s latest “HMI” (Human Machine Interface) that adds a six-inch touch-screen display above the mobile-phone-like bank of buttons as seen on the Fiesta.
Powering the B-Max concept is the tiniest of Ford’s new EcoBoost gasoline engines, a turbocharged 1.0-liter three-cylinder with direct injection and auto start/stop. Ford did not disclose the little mill’s official output figures or any performance or fuel-economy estimates, claiming that the 1.0-liter is still being tweaked before it enters production.Read More:Read More:http://www.caranddriver.com/news/ford-b-max-concept-for-geneva-auto-show-news
Its the whole industrial age mentality. To see James Woolsey shilling for cars in the name of economic security is an ingenious half-truth. Just the space involved that roads take up, space as a public good, the wars used to fight over oil to power the vehicles, the insurance industries based on automotive value, the taxation, the servicing and aesthetic industries; the car is truly a way of life, and not necessarily an appealing one. It is a great barometer of social segregation and the status element of owning a car effectively means that low income people will continue driving even if beyond their means…..
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Anti-cars are crucial to the car business of the future. The joy of driving in Vancouver is the time one has sitting in traffic. Waiting. And waiting. Gridlock, thy name is Vancouver. So while I’d like to say I am wheeling about in a fire engine
2013 Spark, I’m really putt-putting. But the car itself is cute as a bug. Made in South Korea by General Motors’ Daewoo subsidiary, the Spark is what’s called a minicar. The competition? The Spark joins a list that includes the Fiat 500, Smart fortwo and Scion iQ. All are new and at the vanguard of the anti-car movement. We’ll see more of this….
—Cars are the ultimate gateway drug to the obscene levels of status-driven consumption that have sent industrial society into economic collapse and the world into ecological overshoot, helping give us the debt crisis, oil wars and climate change. And that’s just for starters.
If there are cars, then business can crank up car dealers, repair shops, gas stations and places that sell fuzzy dice for your rear view mirror. Then, government must build city streets, rural roads and interstate highways while staffing DMVs, police forces and traffic courts. Not to mention turning the military into an oil protection force, as General Smedley Butler explained in the 1930s.
Indeed, in tough times, there’s no stimulus that governments love better than building roads as a way to put people back to work, and Detroit receives more subsidies than any other industry in the US (Big Oil is #2).
Meantime, as a car driver you can buy a heck of a lot more stuff than you can if you’re carrying bags on the subway or fitting a couple of panniers onto a bicycle. Of course, you can drive your Prius to IKEA. But first things first: just by driving at all, you can trade your tiny city apartment for a big house in the suburbs with plenty of space to fill with furniture, appliances and kids — who in turn, will want their own stuff and thus give you an excuse to take even more trips to IKEA.—Read More:http://transitionvoice.com/2011/08/the-most-dangerous-machine-ever-built/ image:http://www.lassothemovies.com/100-days-100-movies-95-the-last-picture-show-1971/
…The Spark is small by any measure, though this hatchback has four doors and decent room all around. Chevy’s product types are quick to say their Spark has more headroom than its rivals, save the fortwo, and more rear headroom, period. Legroom is best-in-class, as is cargo room. And that big hatch at the rear means I could easily load up with furniture at IKEA if I were a kid who’s just moved out of his parents’ basement. Or back in.
Today, though, I am crawling in the city that, according to the TomTom Congestion Index, is Canada’s most congested and the No. 2 city for gridlock in North America. No. 1, of course, is Los Angeles.
The frustrations of driving in Vancouver were at least delayed for me this morning. Rather than driving, I spent half an hour syncing my Bluetooth phone to my Spark. After four tries and three different codes – don’t ask – I managed to make my phone part of this car. Now my so-called “smart” phone is embedded in what the Chevy people refer to as their “dumb” radio and that comes with all sorts of implications. One is that my Spark is now a rolling tracking device.
Later this year, it will also become an inexpensively equipped navigation device. GM Canada will start selling an app called “Bringgo” and in doing so will be able to sell affordable, smartphone-enabled, turn-by-turn navigation for the masses. Expect to pay somewhere between $50 and $100. Don’t underestimate the importance of this smartphone piece, either….
—had the chance to interview Jim Woolsey, the former CIA Director, who has long been an active proponent of reducing US oil dependence. He is also one of the 17 members of the Chevrolet Volt advisory board, who along with me has been living with a captured test fleet Chevrolet Volt….Do you think the current efforts of companies like GM and Nissan as real efforts that will change the nature of our automotive fleet, or do you think this is greenwashing?
I think certainly the hydrogen highway business back at the beginning of the decade was greenwashing. But I think EVs are different because we all have access to electricity and more public charging networks will come in and things will get easier. And if you’ve got a garage you got it already….Read More:http://gm-volt.com/2010/11/22/qa-with-jim-woolsey-energy-independence-advocate-and-member-of-the-chevy-volt-advisory-board/
You see, the little Spark is not about the driving experience at all. The twentysomething Millennials expected to buy the Spark are far more interested in staying connected than in actually driving, or at least actually enjoying the experience of driving. For car companies, a disturbing number of young people think of cars as nothing more than transportation appliances into which they can pile their friends and “stuff.” As Ross Martin, the executive vice-president of MTV Scratch, a unit of the giant media company Viacom, recently told The New York Times, many young people actually “think of a car as a giant bummer. Think about your dashboard. It’s filled with nothing but bad news.”
The good news for Spark buyers is the connectivity of the MyLink colour touch screen and all the Bluetooth-enabled goodies that can be run through it. Without MyLink, the Spark will mean nothing much to the youth buyers Chevy is courting. Here’s why: nearly half (46 per cent) of U.S. drivers aged 18 to 24 said they would choose Internet access over owning a car, according to the research firm Gartner recently quoted in The New York Times. Chevy wants to be first among auto makers adjusting to changing youth tastes.
If they don’t succeed, the Times story goes, they “risk becoming the dad at the middle school dance,” says Anne Hubert, senior vice-president at Scratch, who leads its consulting practice and works closely with GM. Dad may have become a bit paunchy with middle age, but he’s not phat and he’s not the target customer for the Spark, either.
So the Spark is an early example of a smartphone on wheels. And if you believe a recent survey by Deloitte and Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, most 19- to 31-year-olds from Boston to Beijing to Berlin want exactly that – “a smartphone on wheels.” Tech-savvy young people around the world, The Detroit News reports, want a car that is, of course, tech savvy, flexible, useful and inexpensive. Nearly 60 per cent of young people surveyed by Deloitte said in-dash technology is the most important part of a vehicle’s interior, while 73 per cent said they wanted touchscreen interfaces.Read More:http://m.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/new-cars/new-car-reviews/will-chevys-spark-sparkle/article4452968/?service=mobile
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