Electric Cars Infinity War

I recently asked what the future of SUV's is. Will be. Whatever. And it turned out to be intertwined with the future of electric cars. That's a bit of a complication, since our electric future isn't clear either.

It's been generally assumed that electric vehicles are the future. And car companies are preparing for it, investing huge sums in the technology and infrastructure. But at the same time, turning our back on internal combustion is the sort of huge revolution that doesn't happen without some turbulence. I figure there's still a few roadblocks to a complete electric takeover.

Range

Electric car costs have come down, and performance has been great, But range is still a problem. It’s improved, but not really enough to change anyone’s attitude. This problem isn’t new: for a long time now, we've been able to build electric cars that will easily have enough range for what the average person drives in a day. But, part of the reason for buying a car/truck/SUV is the freedom it gives you, so even if you rarely drive great distances (say, on vacation) you'll likely be reluctant to buy a vehicle that doesn't give you the option to driver greater distances when you want to.

So electric vehicles are fine, if you only ever drive within an hour of your home. But if you want to use your vehicle for anything more than a day trip, you’re out of luck. And don’t even ask about towing something while driving a long distance. Range has increased over the years, but the problem is that the vacation requirement is another order of magnitude farther than the daily-driving requirement. Even a big increase in range only takes a dent out of the vacation range problem. So we need either a huge range increase, or a huge charging-speed increase, to let people believe they can travel greater distances. Until that changes, there's a whole lot of people who won't consider an electric car.

Charging Infrastructure

The speed of charging has long been a stumbling block for electric vehicles. That's improved a lot too, but there's still the problem of where are we going to charge all these cars? If you live in a house, you can charge at home, but an increasing number of people live in apartments or condos, where charging isn't as easy. Yes, we can set up chargers in parking lots and garages of apartment and condo buildings, but that's a lot of infrastructure that still needs to be built, and it will be built by the landlords who won't (directly) make money off it.

And there has to be a solution for charging away from home. There are a fair number of public charging places, but they're mostly set up by either the car companies or public businesses like malls and stores . Those are both loss-leaders: the car company is swallowing the cost to make electric cars more appealing, or the business is swallowing the cost to attract customers. Either way, it's hard to imagine that scaling-up to being a solution for all of us charging our vehicles. I mean, I can't imagine GM — or Tesla, or whoever ends up on top — building a network of chargers big enough for all the cars in society.

The thing that makes me skeptical is that no one is making any significant money off of charging, and that’s usually what’s needed to get a big change like that happening in our society. Note that it doesn’t have to be switching our gas stations to charging stations. It’s entirely possible that the charging business of the future operates with small charging outlets here and there around a city. But they’ve got to make money off it or no one is going to go to all that trouble and expense to build the infrastructure.

Culture War

It's still relatively low-key, but a few people have targeted electric vehicles as a symbol of everything they hate. I don’t really see that going away. Some of the biggest hot-button issues for conservatives in recent years has been asking people to change behaviour. When you see the fury at being told to put on a mask or learn about slavery, it’s hard to imagine people just accepting that their cars are going to totally change whether they like it or not. 

Right now, that’s not an immediate issue: although buyers have ever-increasing choices for electric cars, there still aren’t any segments of the market where the internal-combustion options are disappearing. When we get to that point, there’ll be a lot more anger, and people taking “never electric” stances.

Big Oil

We're about at that point in the movie where it looks like the heroes will succeed, but you're watching, thinking it can’t be over yet, there's still a half hour left before the credits roll. And then the bad guy that you thought was dead reappears, and says, "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" Well, I’m still waiting for that from the oil industry.

Eventually, they've got to make a move against it. I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen much of a campaign against electric vehicles yet. Yes, they're only a small segment of the market so far, but car companies keep positioning themselves to be ready to move to mostly electric production. Surely Big Oil isn't just going to fold up and go home.

When I went looking for stories about the Oil Industry fighting electric vehicles, pretty much all I found was a lot of waffling about how they still make lots of money elsewhere, they'll invest in renewables to make money of the change, they'll sell more stuff at gas station convenience stores to compensate, etc.

Okay, fine, there are ways they can still stay in business and make tidy profits even after electric vehicles take over. But come on people, there's no way large corporations are just going to quietly give up a huge part of their customer base, or retool their entire business, when there's a chance that they can fight to keep things as they are.

They do fund the American Petroleum Institute, which publishes propaganda on their behalf, but most of its actions are just generic government lobbying; not the dirty tricks you'd expect from an industry fighting for trillions.

I've seen the odd story sowing suspicions about electric cars, like the recent one that the extra weight of electric cars will cause aging parking garages to collapse, but that just sounds like desperate casting about for anything that might gain traction. I probably did more damage earlier when I mentioned the problems using electric vehicles for towing.

But then, if they're trying to put together a major campaign to derail electric vehicles, it could be that they are going to get it stuck in the aforementioned culture war. If they can get a significant portion of the population committing to being personally against electric vehicles, adopting that as a part of their identity and world view, it will ensure that fossil fuels can have a foot in the door, preventing the electric domination tipping point for years to come. In that case, their campaigns would target the media of those most likely to buy into the anti-electric position. So it may just be something I haven't personally seen yet.

The McFlurry Is A Lie

I had a weird experience recently when I saw an ad on Facebook looking for McDonald's employees. That's odd to begin with: I'm a bit old for their employee demographic, and in general, Facebook is not a place to go looking for that demographic. But what was really surreal was that this ad came with a game. Click on the link, and you could play a game. What kind of game, you ask? Why, a game of working at McDonald's. It's a drive in Canada to hire 25,000 new employees with a game called Crush the Rush Crew.

In the game, you're looking down at a McDonald's kitchen, as new orders come in at the drive through. You then click/tap on the appropriate employees to have them make an item. And try to keep up. It was a bit dull, since you can only work on the next item in the order queue; you can't strategize by having the burger maker work on a Big Mac for the next order, while the drink maker works on the coffee for the next car in line instead of just twiddling thumbs.

But let's back up here. Depending on your experience with video games, this might seem like a bizarre game idea. But there's actually quite a history with these time management games. If you're my age, you may remember seeing Tapper in the 80's, and not believing that was a real game next to all its contemporaries. So let me shock you again: that genre has kept right on going, and there are now lots of people playing games based on seemingly stressful situations. So the idea of a McDonald's drive through management game is actually the least unexpected part of this scenario. But I would have thought McDonald's wouldn't like the idea of representing their work as a game.

So now I'm trying to wrap my head around this: we've created a genre of game about doing minimum-wage manual labor, and now a company is using one of those games to convince people to do those minimum-wage manual labor jobs. I don't know which surprises me more, that McDonald's embraced the concept to sell people on working for them, or that potential employees haven't just laughed at the concept. I looked at the comments under the Facebook ad expecting lots of vitriol, but there wasn't much. Some people complained about the difficulty of the game, and a few made jokes about how they already played the game in real life. But there was no how-dare-you-make-a-game-of-overworking-your-underpaid-employees. I didn't even see any comments about how unrealistic it was that the game's ice cream machine worked.

It all seems like something from a semi-humorous sci-fi dystopia like Ready Player One or Snow Crash. Though speaking of sci-fi, the idea of gamifying more serious things is not new. Perhaps McDonald's could specifically recruit those who do well in the game, like in The Last Starfighter. Of course, the next level would be if the game were the job; when you play it, your instructions are actually being sent out to some random McDonald’s somewhere in the world, like some kind of banal version of Ender's Game. Actually, that could be good: you do your part running a McDonald’s, and if you do a good enough job, you get a discount on your next purchase. Don’t have enough for a Big Mac Meal? Just take a few minutes to run up a new high score on the Decatur, Georgia drive-through.

Once again, it’s part of our weird future, where work is play, and play is work. I just wish they could find a way to make supermarket self-serve checkouts into a game.