Who Killed the Electric Car?

I skipped a second blog a while back, so that means I needed to go to a bloggable event to make up for it.



Enter Who Killed the Electric Car?, a movie about the General Motors EV1, a fully electric (yeah, none of this hybrid stuff, pal) car. There were only 1,117 made, and none of them were sold--only leased. In the end, they were all crushed.



So, what happened? Well, the last nail in the coffin came when GM realized it would be cheaper to just sue the state of California to undo their clean vehicle regulations than it would be to build electric cars. Also, back then, gas was still cheap and GM thought that people would rather buy large and intimidating SUVs over smaller vehicles like the EV1.



At least, that was the thought before this movie came out. Who Killed the Electric Car? sheds some light on the subject by providing a list of suspects in a whodunnit fashion and goes through them one by one to figure out exactly what happened to the EV1. The list is:

Customers, because they didn't want to drive smaller cars that had less cargo space and less range than gasoline vehicles.

Batteries, because they sucked when the EV1 first came out.

Oil companies, because (just like the FM vs AM wars I described in my powerpoint presentation on Lessig's Free Culture) they saw the EV1 as a threat and did things to stop it from succeeding, like buying patents to prevent modern batteries from being used in modern electric cars.

Car companies, for being way too honest about the EV1's limitations (try getting a used car salesman nowadays to say anything bad about something he's trying to sell you). Also, for not letting people buy EV1s or building enough to respond to the high demand.

Government, for not doing more to raise fuel efficiency or lower emissions.

California Air Resources Board, for caving into pressure to remove the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, conflicts of interest and not letting pro-ZEV people finish talking while giving car companies all the time in the world to finish making their points.

Hydrogen fuel cell, for distracting people with hopes about the future, as opposed to a solution that was already here (electric cars).

In the end, only the batteries were deemed Not Guilty by the movie. As it turns out, new and way, way better batteries were developed, but were not made available.

The Wealth of Networks

I tend to zone out when I see a pages upon pages of justified, practically single-spaced text written in small font, particularly when these pages rarely, if ever, contain more than one paragraph break. So instead of digging through that dizzying clusterfuck of ten-dollar words at 4:20 in the morning just so I can find one relatively interesting passage that reminds me of something more interesting for me to ruminate on, I'm just gonna go ahead and blindly trust the first half of the wiki's four-sentence summary of what's-his-face's 34-page intro to The Wealth of Networks, that:

"Production is shifting from physical products like blue jeans, to decentralized information goods, like articles on the Internet. This gives users more power (they can publish instead of just reading), creates more opportunities for democratic participation, lowers costs for developing countries, and democratizes the creation of our culture."



Best example? You're reading one right now: blogs. Peer-created, decentralized information goods like blogs have proven to be rather useful, including very recently when journalists look[ed] to bloggers for [more information on the] Virginia Tech story, something I'm shamelessly ripping from Prerana Chhabria's blog.



Other examples include sites like Fark.com and SlashDot.org, of which I've been an RSS subscriber since the day I discovered "live" bookmarks via RSS feeds and added these feeds to this blog just for the hell of it. Sites like these are decentralized in the sense that any user--not just administrators or moderators--can sign up and submit stories, questions or links to articles and spark massive discussions about them. SlashDot focuses on "news for nerds", dealing mostly with tech subjects, including "Your Rights Online", but there's also a section for science and politics. Fark focuses on "not news", originally satirizing how news organizations publish "stories" that in reality are of no value, but have expanded to included a wide variety of cool and interesting things to read while maintaining an always-funny and (given some of the material) surprisingly intelligent community.



Sites that are wide open for discussion and rely on the contributions of others are excellent sources of discussion and quick information. The successful ones grow very quickly and in turn require powerful servers that can handle many users at once. When someone posts a new topic that points to another site for people to read and comment on, often those sites crash because they cannot keep up with the sudden spike in users--this is known as the "SlashDot effect" or being "Farked".



An extremely bandwidth-consuming event is a national tragedy, where millions of people flood the phone lines and news sites desperately seeking information about the events that unfolded and the status of their loved ones. Phone lines may overload, and news sites may crash--not Fark, however; since it already gets insane amounts traffic on a daily basis, it is much more likely to remain up during times like that. Tragedies can also take out communications, as was the case with 9/11 (many TV news feeds were in the towers, as well as a major Internet hub that feededs all of Europe) however, as you can see in the Farkives, Fark was alive and well, and users who live near Ground Zero or were lucky enough to get through to news sites were able to instantly share that information to the world.