Let’s Talk About Cars. (This is probably going to be boring so feel free to skip this one.)

I’ve been thinking about the future of automobiles of late and I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense to me.

Let’s start with EVs. Don’t get me wrong. I like electric vehicles. But I’m not sure if they are going to be the ultimate solution to the problem of weaning people off of internal combustion engines. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think that we have enough electrical generating capacity or a resilient enough electrical distribution system to deal with the tens of millions of EVs some people would like to see on the road. Then add into that mix electric long haul trucks, electric tractors and electric, well, electric everything, and the situation becomes even more strained.

But that is a problem that can (or could be if we’d be willing to actually pay for it) fixed relatively easily, however. There is another problem that is not so easily fixed.

There are something like 1.4 billion motor vehicles in the world. That is not a typo. 1.4 billion. There are close to 300 million in the United States alone. And people think that we can replace every single one of those internal combustion engine powered vehicles with their electric counterpart.

Guess what? We can’t.

Building those hundreds of millions of electric vehicles requires raw materials that aren’t easy to find, are difficult to mine, difficult to refine and distribute. And even the more common resources that are needed, like copper for wiring, are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. (And that doesn’t just affect the car makers, it’s rippling out through the whole economy. Have you seen what copper wire sells for these days?) And to make things even more interesting, a lot of those resources come from places that aren’t exactly friendly towards us, like China.

What it boils down to is that we simply don’t have enough raw materials to be able to make even a significant fraction of the number of EVs it would take to replace all of the ICE powered vehicles currently in use.

Production could be expanded, true. But it can take years, decades even, to find mineral deposits, obtain financing, build infrastructure necessary to develop a mine, build the infrastructure to do the processing, etc. Even worse, some of these materials are so scarce that there’s a very good chance that even if we went all out with trying to exploit our natural resources, we wouldn’t have enough.

And I have another question. Who suddenly decided that the best, the only solution to our transportation problems, was the electric vehicle? What happened to all of the other alternatives that were being experimented with like the various hydrogen powered alternatives for example? We’ve been experimenting with hydrogen powered cars for decades. They work pretty well, the only emission that comes out of them is water vapor. There are about 50,000 of them on the road and they’ve proven to be a viable alternative to gasoline powered vehicles.

What about other alternative types of transportation that would eliminate the need for a lot of driving in the first place like light rail or even bus service? You’d think that if the government wanted to wean people off ICE powered vehicles the first thing it would try to do would be to make it easier for people to not drive in the first place. Instead the state legislature here in Wisconsin is trying desperately to shut down every expansion of rail or bus service it can, and even eliminate existing facilities by starving them of funding of any sort.

But let’s forget about EVs for a moment and look at the trends in car manufacturing in general. I have questions about that as well.

Car Makers Making Cars Worse

Yeah, they are. From stupid noise generators that try to make EVs sound like overpowered gas or diesel engined monsters, to fake gear shift levers, to “info -tainment” systems that distract driver’s attention by making it impossible to even adjust the temperature of the heater without taking your eyes off the road, car makers seem determined to make cars worse.

The fake engine and exhaust noises and the fake gear shifters are, at least, not dangerous. But some of the other things they’re doing are, like what’s going on with a vehicle’s control systems, are dangerous.

Why do they have to make cars so damned complicated? Let’s look at my Buick Envision. This thing is supposedly a “luxury” car, with the top of the line trim level with all of the goodies you can get. And some of them are admittedly pretty neat and even improve the safety of the car. But some of the things they do…

Like where the hell is the headlight switch? Seriously. I couldn’t find the switch to manually turn the headlights on and off when I got the car. It was set in auto mode when I got it, so the headlights turned themselves on and off as necessary depending on light levels and weather conditions, but I still wanted to be able to turn the damned things on manually if I needed to. I finally found it. It turned out to be a tiny dial located way down out of my light of sight on the dash near my left knee. Oh, and it wasn’t labeled as a headlight control. All it said was “on off auto”. On off auto what, though? No idea until I actually played with it.

Same with the auto dimming headlights. That’s a nice feature. It automatically dims the headlights a night when there is an oncoming car. But it also dims the lights when it comes upon a lighted billboard, a reflective road sign, and it does it even in town, the lights constantly going from bright to dim when I go past a street light. I finally found that. It’s a little button labeled “Auto” embedded in the turn signal stalk.

Now I could have found that out by reading the owner’s manual, but who actually ever reads that thing? And in any case, systems as essential to operate as the headlights should be so clearly labeled that anyone can find and operate them properly.

One day I went out to the garage and I noticed that all of the windows in the car were down. All of them. Uh? I had to go back in the house to get the key fob so i could get in the car and start it, roll all the windows back up again, and didn’t think anything else much about it. Until the next day I went out there and all of the windows were down again. That happened maybe another three times. So I complained to the dealer about it.

The dealer didn’t know what the hell was going on either so the service manager started to do some research while the car was in for an oil change. Turns out this is a “feature”. Apparently under the right conditions, if you hit the right combination of buttons on the key fob, all of the windows in the car open up to cool off the interior of the car before the air conditioning starts up to put less strain on the aircon system. Why was my car doing it? I didn’t remember hitting random buttons on the key fob or anything like that. But we unanimously agreed that a car that rolls down all of its windows while no one is even near the car is not a good idea and they figured out how to disable that, thankfully, and it hasn’t happened since.

Then there is the massage system built into the seat. Yeah, it has one. And it is utterly horrible in every single way. It is distracting, irritating and even painful if you already have a bad back the way I do. And if you fumble around down on the left side of the seat to try to adjust the seating position, you absolutely will hit the damned massage button and then you can’t turn the effing thing off again without stopping, getting out of the car so you can see the controls down there and figure out which one does what so you can shut the thing off.

What I really want is something like, well, this…

That is an old Honda Z600 from the early 1970s and I used to have one of these little beasties back in the day. It’s what is known as a kei car, and they are the most popular vehicle in Japan and have been for some time. I had it back in the mid 1970s. It had a 2 cylinder air cooled, 600CC engine, a 4 speed transmission, front wheel drive, these cute little 10 inch tires and it was utterly nasty in every way. Even so the thing was an absolute hoot to drive. Despite the tiny engine it could cruize at 65 mph all day long, it got about 50 MPG, and you could fix it with a screwdriver and a few bits of tin foil. Thanks to its light weight and front wheel drive it even worked good in the snow.

The only problem I had was that it often wasn’t where I left it when I came out of work or school because people thought it was great fun to pick it up and run off with it. Four guys could pick the thing up and carry it off.

It had a AM radio, a heater that didn’t work, and, well, nothing else. No power anything. No frills, no luxury nonsense. It was basically a box with a small, zipping little engine, four wheels, and that was it.

And, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the US government, they banned their import shortly after I got mine for “reasons”.

When I got the 600 it was about a year old and had only about 10,000 miles on it. I paid about $500 for it and it was the best $500 I’d ever spent. And if I could get another one I’d buy it in a heartbeat because ultimately that’s all I want or need, a basic, simple, cheap, reliable car.