Blog HSTC 100

STC 100 Society, Technology & Culture Dr Adam Lucas

 Individuals from certain professions & occupations,

such as doctors, managers, engineers & salesmen found cars useful in their work.

 Social groups such as urban poor & farmers

regarded cars as anti-social, disruptive nuisance.  Institutions such as local & state authorities

regarded cars as potential public safety hazard, but also source of tax revenue for provision of appropriate infrastructure.

 For decades, LA had been blanketed in smog that was creating long-term health problems for the city’s population, particularly its children.

 One quarter of 15 to 25 year olds medically examined in LA County in 1989 were found to have severe lung lesions from air pollution.

 In the 1970s, there were more than 100

Stage 1 smog alerts per year, when health authorities recommended that people stay indoors as much as possible.

 According to American Lung Association, LA

remains most polluted city in US, despite aggressive regulatory measures to reduce air pollution in recent decades.

 Because nothing was being done at Federal level to take action, public

health authorities in California felt obligation to force automobile manufacturers to radically reduce vehicle emissions.

 Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was 1st & only US president to

increase vehicle emission standards.

 Carter’s Republican presidential successor, Ronald Reagan, quickly

removed solar panels on White House that Carter ordered be placed there, & George Bush Snr came from big family of Texas oil men.

 Neither president favourably inclined toward environmental issues.  California therefore ‘went it alone’ & used its legislative power within

8th US largest Constitution, economy its economic on earth to muscle reduce as vehicle most populous emissions. state in USA &

 Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary

nominally looks at development & commercialization of electric car.

 Main focus is introduction by

California Government in 1990 of controversial Zero Emissions Vehicle law & effect it had on US automobile market over subsequent 15 years or so.

 Documentary explores a number of issues relevant to

STS, including:

 social & political factors shaping pace, direction & outcomes

of technological development;

 possibility that technological development can follow

multiple alternative pathways;

 how large-scale technological systems acquire extraordinary

inertia & resistance to change, even in case where they engender severe social, political & economic problems.

 Therefore excellent case study for student research.

 ZEV law drafted by California Air Regulatory Board (CARB) in

effort to address growing problem of air pollution in State’s major cities, particularly Los Angeles (pop. 17 million).

 California’s ZEV law of 1990 mandated that automobile

manufacturers produce an increasing percentage of zero emissions vehicles for the California market over time.

 Although several thousand electric motor vehicles were

produced over the subsequent period & were extremely popular with those who leased them, the law was overturned on 24 April 2003.

 Documentary focuses on reasons why the law was

introduced, & why it was subsequently overturned.

GM’s much-loved EV: a museum piece Chrysler TEVan Toyota RAV4 EV Honda EV Plus hatchback

1. American consumers
2. inadequate battery technology
3. hydrogen fuel cell technology as a viable alternative
4. US Federal Government
5. California’s Air Regulatory Board (CARB)
6. US oil companies
7. US car companies

 Ironically, California Government’s decision to introduce

ZEV law was in response to GM’s decision a few years earlier to develop an electric vehicle.

 GM had instructed a couple of its senior managers &

marketing people to lead the project & develop demand for electric vehicles worldwide.

 GM then delegated task of producing an electric vehicle

for mass production to a small group of its scientists, engineers & designers at its Technical Center in LA.

 Those who worked on EV technology for GM did

their best to produce a top-quality & high performing car for the market by 1995, & they succeeded by most accounts.

 Between 1996 & 1998, GM produced 1,117 EV1’s,

800 of which were made available on 3-year leases.

 People who considered themselves lucky enough

to lease one (because the company didn’t allow people to buy them) really loved their cars.

 Designers & engineers felt they’d made a major

breakthrough, which their own PR people told

them was in hot demand.

 They thought the car they made was great, & they

did their best to promote it, but senior executives in the company were anything but convinced.

 Even though they’d developed an electric car, the

EV1, the GM hierarchy seemed determined to downplay the car’s attractiveness & kill off the program as quickly as it could.

 GM’s communications spokesman claims in

film that GM spent $1 billion on promoting EV.  Advertisements it produced for EV seem to be

aimed at turning people off the cars, rather than making them look attractive.

 Here are a few examples:

 [See also clips: 18 mins 28 secs & 19 mins 18 secs

into film]

 Advertisements seem as though they want to frighten people into not buying the product.

 Subtext of ad with the shadows on the

pavement makes it look like anyone who might want to buy the car will be vaporised by a nuclear weapon, or eaten up by some alien like in an episode of Dr Who.

 GM’s marketing arm argued that:

 consumers simply weren’t interested in electric vehicles;  EV performance in terms of range wasn’t as good as

conventional petrol-driven vehicles;

 EV technology still had lots of bugs in it.

 Familiar arguments which echo those that led to

demise of electric car technology 80 years earlier.

 GM Executive’s behaviour regarding:

 ‘anti-advertising’ of EVs  refusal to allow EV leaseholders to purchase vehicles  recall of all EVs on lease  destruction of all EVs once vehicles were recalled

 tell different story to its publicly stated views.  Last GM EVs were taken from Burbank on 15

March 2005 & destroyed.

Documentary clearly reveals that interests of

design & manufacturing arms of GM conflicted with

those of its senior executive, marketing & public relations arms. By crushing EVs, GM ensured it did not have to maintain them under Federal law.

 Why would intellectual workers in a company – ‘content producers’ in today’s jargon – have a different outlook on the company’s best interests compared with senior management?

 Obviously they’d be different to general workforce –

labourers & salespeople – but wouldn’t they be more likely to see ‘the big picture’ for the company, in a similar way to management?

 Why, or why not?

 Disjunction in values between different sectors of a

company is quite a common feature of multinational companies & large bureaucracies

 Particularly apparent in large companies involved in

manufacturing products of any kind.

 Although documentary represents this disjunction, it

arguably makes little effort to clearly articulate it as major factor in death of EV tech.

 Up until 1960s throughout the developed world, most

large manufacturing companies were run by engineers who’d acquired management skills (& quite often, their engineering education) on the job.

 These men had worked their way up the company hierarchy, or started the businesses themselves.

 They understood most aspects of company business in

detail, including its technical requirements.

 Also, they often had detailed knowledge of factory

shopfloor & skills of workforce that made their products.

 When capitalism really started going global in the 1970s, all that

changed.

 Phenomenon of stagflation in late ‘60s & early ‘70s led to calls by international captains of industry to abandon Keynesian model of economic interventionism by government.

 Multinationals called for embrace of Chicago School of free

market economics:

 small government  minimal government intervention & ‘self-regulation’  privatization of government assets  ‘rationalization’ or downsizing of workforces, etc, etc.

 Graduate schools of management & new economics &

finance schools which promoted these new ideas sprang up all over English-speaking world.

 Large multinational companies soon began hiring

these new graduates with these new ideas.  After all, why wouldn’t they?  Multinationals were the ones who promoted these

ideas & funded these schools in the first place!

 Whole culture of management & kinds of people who worked

in management jobs changed radically over 10-15 year period.

 New managers favoured cost-cutting & corporate takeovers

over innovation & worker satisfaction to improve productivity & profitability.

 ‘Old values’ of engineers, scientists & designers, which were at

least partially informed by notions of building trust in the workplace, & rewarding hard work & loyalty to one’s company with better career prospects, counted for little in the neo liberal workplace of the free marketeers.

 In fact, behaving like those things mattered would most likely

be a liability for you.

 As the GM executives fought California’s ZEV law &

starved their own EV program of support, they simultaneously decided to take over the company that manufactured the Hummer.

 GM subsequently put enormous time & resources into

promoting the Hummer as their flagship vehicle.

 The end result of GM executives’ far-sighted strategy?

 GM went bankrupt, begging for bailout by the US taxpayer.  In lockstep with neo-liberal management executives around

the world, GM executives had insisted for years that we should have smaller governments, that government shouldn’t be involved in business, & that the private sector knows best how to run things.

 With its back to the wall, the country’s biggest car

manufacturer did a complete backflip & begged President Bush & then President Obama for the best part of US$50 billion to keep it afloat.

 We could be excused for thinking that the GM

executives were, in fact, being employed by the oil companies throughout this sorry tale.

 At the very least, it seems they regarded their

interests as identical.

 But the oil companies had their own plans to

oppose the manufacturing & promotion of EVs.

 A ‘front group’ is a group that appears to represent interests of some particular group in society (usually ordinary citizens) but in fact represents interests which are often the exact opposite of what they purport to be.

 The fossil fuel industry (like the forest industry & the mining industry & other resource-extracting industries) has a long history of setting up front groups of ‘concerned citizens’ to make it appear that there is much more widespread community support for their industries than is actually the case.

 In this case, the oil industry set up consumer front groups to oppose the California legislation requiring the construction of EV recharging stations throughout California, much like the nuclear industry sponsors groups like UK’s ‘Landscape Guardians’ to oppose windfarms.

 The US Federal Government under George W. Bush engaged in a major PR campaign that many people regarded as a classic example of ‘bait & switch’.

 ‘Bait & switch’ is a wonderfully evocative American hunting expression

that’s been applied to politics.

 When the heat is on a government or corporation over some serious or scandalous event, those who are feeling the heat manufacture or fabricate some other controversy or scandal that draws the public’s attention away from the troublesome first problem.

 Public is baited into swallowing a different story as being far more interesting or important, & their attention is successfully switched: hence, bait & switch.

 George W. Bush’s Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton,

poured US$1 billion into hybrid vehicle R&D.  US car manufacturers steadfastly neglected to

incorporate hybrid tech into their suite of vehicles.

 George Dubya & Vice President, Dick ‘crack shot’

Cheney, quickly killed off Clinton’s program, presumably because they thought it might be successful.

 Their own white elephant was a US$1 billion program to

fund hydrogen fuel cell research & development, presumably because they knew it never would be successful, or at least, not within their lifetimes, anyway.

1. Average fuel cell car in 2006 cost US$1 million.
2. There wasn’t enough room in the car for enough hydrogen fuel to get the range that consumers wanted (125 miles in 2006 prototype).
3. Hydrogen fuel is expensive (even H from fossil fuels cost 3-4 times as much as petrol in 2006).
4. 10-20,000 US fuelling stations are required to make them a viable alternative to the 180,000 US petrol stations.
5. Competing hybrid & electric technologies mustn’t improve & capture more market share.

 Argument 2 is fair enough, but the same applied to electric cars until quite recently: range was an issue & continues to be, even though that’s mainly because manufacturers are not putting best battery technology in their cars!

 Argument 3 might have applied during ‘cheap petrol’ time in the US, but in

Europe they already pay 3-4 times as much for petrol as they do in the US, & with peak oil already upon us, it won’t be long before US & Australian consumers are paying European prices.

 Argument 4 can just as easily be levelled at electric vehicle recharging

stations, so that’s a bit below the belt.

 Nevertheless, with respect to Argument 1, there are not too many people who

can afford a $1 million car.

 Considering electric & hybrid vehicles are already on the market & far cheaper

than fuel cell cars, future for the fuel cell doesn’t look so rosy.

 Battery technology first bought up by GM, then sold off

to Exxon-Mobil as a sure-fire strategy to ...?

 Surely a big multinational oil company wouldn’t stifle

technological innovation in such a self-interested way?  Isn’t that just conspiracy nut, whack-job talk, as our

friends on Fox News would say?

 By 2006, there was already electric battery technology

that would give cars a 300 mile range.

 But none of those batteries were fitted into electric cars

until very recently.

 Despite all the manoeuvring & resistance to California’s

ZEV laws by auto executives, oil companies, Republican politicians & to some extent, consumers, 20 years later the law still exists, although with some modification.

 ZEV laws have driven major innovations & changes in

manufacturer & consumer behaviour in the US.

 Growing public awareness of the realities of peak oil &

human-induced climate change clearly indicate such laws & associated policies need to be implemented worldwide.