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.

SUV Endgame

A question people sometimes ask in the car world is, what is the SUV endgame?  That is, are we stuck with them forever? Will future generations just have SUV’s, with cars consigned to the history books? Or is the pendulum going to swing back, and we'll look back on the SUV era like the car industry's answer to bell bottoms.

See, the CEO of Citroen said that the days of the SUV are numbered. His reasoning was that in the coming age of electric vehicles, aerodynamics will be important in order to extend range, and that isn't exactly the forte for SUVs. 

I asked the SUV question a few years ago, and the answer I gave was that SUV's would get smaller and sleeker while cars would get taller, and we'd end up with this sort of in-between vehicle. At the time, I used examples like the Toyota C-HR. But since then, Toyota has introduced the Corolla Cross, and announced the C-HR will be discontinued in North America. 

The Corolla Cross is — as the name implies — just a Corolla stretched into an SUV. That's quite common; I hope you’re sitting down for this, but most SUV's these days are just adapted car designs. But usually they don't tell anyone, because they want SUV buyers to have the illusion that they have a rugged and wild off-road vehicle, not just a tall station wagon.

But by putting the name of that car in the name of the SUV, Toyota has shown us a rare moment of honesty from SUV marketing. So you'd think that if the car industry was going to start evolving a middle ground between cars and SUV's, this vehicle would be where it starts. 

And yet, the Corolla Cross is a boxy, stereotypical SUV, just smaller. It looks like the designers went out of their way to convince everyone that it's a big-boy SUV, even if that makes it look a little silly. So it seems that catering to the masculinity reinforcement needs of America overrules any other car priorities, and that doesn't look good for anyone expecting a non-SUV future. 

But there is one reason that Citroen CEO could be right, and electric cars could change the shape of SUV's. It starts with the little-known fact that there are a few reasons why manufacturers like SUV's, besides the obvious fact that consumers like them. One is that they are legally considered off-road vehicles in the United States, which means they are not subject to the same mileage requirements as cars. But to officially qualify for that off-road designation, they have to meet certain regulations, such as ground clearance, and the shape of body work around the wheels. 

But electric cars don't have to worry about mileage regulations. So there's no need to meet those design requirements, and the designers of electric SUV's have greater freedom in shaping the vehicles.  So far, electric SUV's and crossovers have been going away (a little) from the traditional SUV shape. Looking at models like the Jaguar I-Pace and Hyundai Ioniq 5, they're still taller than average cars, but also lower and less boxy than SUV's. So there does appear to be some effort to squeeze more aerodynamics out of them.

Of course, electric SUV's also give designers more freedom because unlike their gas-powered brethren, no one is buying one as an affirmation of masculinity — I assume that's part of the reason that they are a lot less angular and big-looking. They don’t look much like off-road vehicles. And is it just me, or do the Tesla model X and Y even look a bit like <gasp> Minivans.

If we get to the point that electric cars are completely taking over, this may change. In that case, electric cars will have to start appealing to everyone, not just people on the rich and green side of things.  We might even see electric vehicles get more masculine than conventional cars if electric vehicles have to work harder to convince mainstream buyers that they're not emasculating beta-mobiles. Arguably, the Tesla Cybertruck is already an example of this.  But for now, they're showing us a possible way forward into a future of more practical, only-sort-of SUV future.

There's A Swingin' Town I Know Called... Capital City

Looking back at some of my old posts, I came across one from 2015 about how Egypt was planning to build a new capital to replace Cairo. Well, to replace it as capital: I mean, Cairo would still be there, it just wouldn't be capital anymore. I was curious what became of that idea; the whole thing had seemed like a pipe dream, so I was kind of assuming that I'd find the project had been canceled years ago, or pushed to the back burner.

Nope, it's still happening. In fact, it's under construction as we speak. You can even see it on Google Earth.  It still doesn't have a name yet, so it's just the New Administrative Capital. It's also not really far from Cairo. When combined with some other new developments going on, they're going to end up with a really big continuous urban area. Egypt already looks pretty unusual from the aerial perspective, with the contrast between the desert and the irrigated area around the Nile, and now it’s also going to have a huge urban smear across it.

The other surprising thing I learned is that it's not even the only replacement capital under construction. Both Indonesia and South Korea have new capitals on the go.

South Korea has been moving government institutions from Seoul to the planned city of Sejong for years. It was only founded in 2007, but already has 350,000 people. It seems the idea of officially moving the capital is still controversial and may never completely happen, but even as it is, they've put a lot of work into it. 

Indonesia is building Nusantara to replace Jakarta. It's still early in the process, having only started last year. But they're being bolder, building it on a totally different island from current capital and largest city, Jakarta. 

So what's the reason behind these new capitals? In my previous post, I assumed that if a country is going to build an entirely new city to be the capital, it must be a case of vanity, or some kind of national mid-life-crisis. There may be some of that, but in each of these cases, there is a practical purpose too: a very large and over-crowded capital. Moving the government out will drag some of the people out and into another part of the country. I - the resident of a country where the capital is not the largest city - didn't think of that. Oh, and Jakarta is slowly sinking. And Seoul is uncomfortably close to North Korea. 

So maybe we'll see more of them in the future. There are plenty of over-stuffed capital cities in the world; starting over on cheap land somewhere else must be pretty tempting. Even if it does make geography quizzes harder worldwide.

Take My 5G, Please

Have you ever seen something that just seemed to contradict its own existence? I mean there are so many different aspects that it seems impossible that anyone could have created it. I’m thinking of something like this:

I took this photo almost a year ago, but I recently noticed that the graffiti is still there. And it’s still puzzling me.

First of all, it's got a 1950’s sense of humour. That's not something you usually see in graffiti. Henny Youngman must be <checks Wikipedia> rolling in his grave. Maybe graffiti was like that in the 1950's, but even then, I doubt you had graffiti written from the perspective of a married man.

On top of that, this is an anachronistic joke with a reference to modern technology in it. Even if it were in a less-strange context, that's weird. It's the joke Benny Hill would do if he'd made it to the twenty-first century. Is Andy Capp still going? Maybe it does jokes like this.

And now it's at least a year old, and neither the owner of the wall, nor other graffiti artists have covered it up in all that time. And did I mention that this is the parking lot for a sushi place? Lots of people have been staring at this, confused, for months. Probably feeling like they should blame a generation, but they have no idea which one.

Was it done by an abnormally young-at-heart Boomer, or an abnormally sexist Millennial? I'm wracking my brain to figure it out. At least, using whatever part of my brain is not currently trying to pun Banksy with an old comedian's name. Whatever Sherlock instincts I have left say that it was done by a Baby Boomer. Yes, it mentions Wi-fi, but it has that joke-referring-to-something-I've-heard-of-but-don't-understand style that launched a thousand late-night routines. So I feel safe blaming them. I'll just add it to the list.

A Place To Rebuild

One story during my blog interregnum was the new plans for Ontario Place. I’m reminded of that now because some of the nostalgia accounts I follow on social media have run pictures from its beginnings in the early seventies.

Ontario Place redevelopment wasn’t a big deal to me; I don’t really have a personal connection with it. My experience is the same as many in southern Ontario; I’ve been there a few times as an adjunct to a trip to the CNE, and that’s about it. But the announcements of the new plans for the site stuck in my mind for a very notable reason: It made me feel sorry for Doug Ford.

Yes, I detest our premier, but I couldn’t help but have sympathy for him for the same reason I feel sorry for all politicians in office: they have to work in reality, while the rest of us compare that to faulty memories of the past or unrealistic imaginings of the future.

This was a great example of that pattern. His government announced an uninspiring but reasonable plan to revitalize the park, and that was greeted by howls of complaints about how he had ruined one of the great amusement parks of the world. People, we’re talking about a park that’s been closed for a decade. It was closed because it was losing money so fast that a Liberal government thought it wasn't worth keeping open. So when people wax nostalgic about the park, I have to wonder where they've been recently. Or more specifically, if people were so happy with how the park was, how come it wasn't more popular.

I have at least learned a bit about the history of Ontario Place. It always seemed like an oddity in the entertainment world I grew up in, with low-fear rides and semi-intellectual attractions in a world where most amusement parks were competing to have the scariest roller coasters and as many licensed-characters as possible. 

Fun fact: Ontario Place opened less than four months before Disney World.

I just assumed that Ontario Place was what happened when the theme park concept was filtered through government. But no, it turns out Ontario Place was an attempt to recreate Montreal’s Expo 67. I guess it should have been obvious: artificial islands with a geodesic dome as the crown jewel; sounds familiar.  Rides have been added over the years to bring in more visitors, but it never truly became a ride-oriented park like Canada's Wonderland. 

Fun fact: Canada's Wonderland has 17 roller coasters, which is tied for second most in the world. 

Personally, I was cautiously optimistic about the new plans for the park. Like I say, the plan wasn’t that great. It was sort of like when Ford announced new license plates: “A Place to Grow” wasn’t the greatest plate motto ever, but it seemed like Shakespeare given that we were bracing for something like, “Open for Business.” With Ontario Place, the proposed assortment of attractions announced was a bit uninspiring, but because we were expecting casinos and condos, the plan came as a relief.

I have to be honest, if we look at this realistically, I doubt there’s any saving Ontario Place, and it’s all because of the location. Driving there means going through some very busy thoroughfares. It’s not well-served by public transit. Putting up condos on the land would be disappointing and boring, but at least it would be successful.

Hold This Thread As I Walk Away

Scotiabank has been promoting a new book they're sponsoring, called The Hockey Jersey. The commercials make the point that it's to promote inclusion and tolerance. That's something everyone in hockey agrees is important,  but isn't too good at actually doing. And although Scotiabank are selling physical copies of the book, you can also download a digital copy for free from their website, which is the nicest thing a bank has done since, well, ever. 

It's about a bunch of young girls who come together as a team after they get their own hockey jerseys, which somehow look better than at least half of NHL uniforms. Of course, that title is similar to The Hockey Sweater, the classic story by Roch Carrier, about a boy in Quebec who is mistakenly given a sweater of the hated rival Toronto Maple Leafs, not the Montreal Canadiens sweater he wanted. There is also an animated version from the National Film Board available for streaming.

(As an aside, I love that in the middle of the Wikipedia synopsis of the story, they point out the plot hole: the fateful sweater was ordered from Eaton’s, and Eaton’s pioneered the money-back guarantee, so the mother could easily have returned or exchanged the sweater. Don’t ever change, Wikipedia.)

This being hockey, a lot of people will surely resent something new piggybacking on something old. But I think it gives us an opportunity. Can we finally give The Hockey Sweater a rest? When I was a kid it was really over-used in school. The story was drilled into us so much, one time in junior high, when the teacher announced that we’d be reading a wonderful new story called The Hockey Sweater, the whole class groaned. She was honestly surprised we had not only heard of it but were already sick of it. Now, I find out it was only written in 1979, and thus was a little less than a decade old at the time, so I can understand her not realizing how fast it had saturated the school system.

But it's easy to get why teachers were eager to use it: it's a perfect storm of sports, Canadiana, and situations relatable to kids. Also, looking back, I can appreciate how much of mid-twentieth-century Quebec life he squeezed in: People forced to do business in English, the towering authority of the church, the place of Maurice Richard as a hero. In the eternal quest to find things that will engage students, it sounds like quite a find. 

But there's a problem with The Hockey Sweater that really bugged me - I mean besides it being overused. I've been carrying this around with me ever since, so get comfortable.

It's not really a kids' story. Yes, I know, it's about children, but that doesn't mean they're the target audience. A story can be about children or through the eyes of children without being intended for them. To Kill a Mockingbird, Angela’s Ashes, Lord of the Flies, etc.

Like those books, The Hockey Sweater is pretty dark, when you look at it. The main character doesn't do anything wrong, but ends up a social pariah. His mother doesn't care about his situation. His religion blames him for his problems. And then there's the subtext that his people are trapped in a system rigged against them. Add a murder and it would be hailed as a classic of existentialism. 

An adult can appreciate a story of frustration and futility, but at the time, I found it really depressing. At a young age, children are still expecting stories to have a moral, or at least, to not be a nihilistic commentary of on the futility of life. 

That recounting of unfair situations is also the kind of thing that is best appreciated with a buffer of a few decades to protect you from the raw reality. Sure, now I can read a story about a kid ostracized for wearing the wrong clothes. That’s a common trope of stories about young people. But back then, it was your average weekday. Seeing that happen in a story, with no comeuppance for the bullies or actions by the adults in charge was, well, again: your average weekday. When his only hope for justice is divine-intervention moths, and that’s presented as the punchline, it just seemed hopeless.

So let's retire the Hockey Sweater. Print it on a Syl Apps jersey and lift it into the Bell Centre rafters beside Richard's number 9. That girl in the Scotiabank book can annoy future generations.