by Terese Svoboda
The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, sometimes exorbitant rentals were available. Those with the ties to TV stations became the pioneers of art video. The rest of us painfully wove our laurels out of what could be cadged or granted. The tech, always changing, improved year by year, as did access and the imagery. We were offered new ways to think about color, resolution, and the translation of experience to video. Seeing invention at work as each new video tool appeared – sometimes developed by the artists themselves – was thrilling.
I’m reminded of that thrill every time I read the rather pedestrian-sounding Green Car Reports, a daily survey of the wildly innovative engineering teams who are pushing the market to accept what’s going to save the planet. Not that experimental video had quite that lofty aim, not even the neighborhood verite cable programs were that high-minded, but early video did require persuasive skill and constant tech fooling around in order to share the fruits of our clumsy innovations.
I don’t own a car. Never have I taken the slightest bit of interest in cars. I couldn’t tell a Chrysler from a GTO. Whoops! Are they the same? But about a decade after I weaned myself off video tech – tiring, at last, of always having to learn new skills – I became fascinated with the Jetson-future-feeling surrounding electric cars. Once again I could see invention unfolding with a capital I, creation in battle with capitalism trying to outrace the death of the planet. Like Nikola Tesla vs. Edison quarreling over AC vs. DC power, only we’re all going over Niagara Falls.[1]
Green Car Reports publishes stories about attempts to redesign and rethink the fuel, the vehicle, the range and the materials. Someone’s always coming up with an alternative to lithium, the scarce and controversially-mined element that makes the electricity in the electric car possible. Every week there’s announcements of new discoveries of lithium in someone’s backyard and not in far away Africa, or that some other material can replace it – like maybe sand – and lots of talk about using recycling for everything from the lithium to the upholstery to the very wheels. And every other week, another car manufacturer throws its hat in the air and either gives up or opens a new plant. In the case of Fisker – and even Chevy with regard to its Bolt – they dusted off what worked and tried again. Someone’s always reporting that mainstream media has declared Tesla a complete failure, while it sold more than 1.2 million cars last year. Tesla itself acknowledged that achieving the auto industry’s “best Selling vehicle in any category in the world” moniker in only 4 years is unthinkable, given that Elon said it would take five. EV sales are not plummeting as dealers would suggest, but are as robust as ever. Dealers everywhere are notoriously loath to sell EVs, the antipathy arising I believe from Tesla’s technique of bypassing them altogether, as well diminished revenue as a result of Biden’s $7500 rebate. I say check to see what the government is buying – from 40,000 postal trucks in the US to the City of London’s order of 45 electric ambulances. NASCAR is featuring its first electric stock car.
Given my permanent resident status in British Columbia, the EV capital of Canada, I was delighted to hear that the country has unveiled Project Arrow, its own electric car. The buses on the streets are electric, and across from my float home sits an electric float plane that will launch direct seaplane flights between Washington’s Friday Harbour Marina and Victoria’s Inner Harbour, starting this May. Every year the hockey rink in Victoria hosts an electric car show during a game. We went last year and since I’d never seen hockey in action before, it took me a while to understand that I had to watch the puck, not the handsome young men whacking at it. More fascinating were the models encircling the rink, where I had a chance to sit inside them and fool with the steering, although delivery there often required months of waiting.
I first leased a Chevy Bolt in 2017. My friend Brett Berk, contributing editor to Car and Driver, Road & Track and occasional writer for Architectural Digest, suggested that I start with a standard brand, that they would be most likely to remain in the market. Ha, Chevy discontinued the Bolt within five years – although they have now reconsidered and are now releasing new Bolts. It was a wonderful car to drive, responsive, inexpensive, good range, great design. We powered it through solar panels on the roof so every aspect was free. My son crashed it halfway through the lease, driver-error, no fault of the Bolt.
The Tesla 3 I bought used online. One click. Okay, probably a whole series of clicks, but fast. After nine months, I sold it – nearly at a profit – because it was too hard for me as a seventy-something to get in and out of it. Oh, and I resented having to watch a video to figure out how to open the frunk. Oh, and I was appalled to discover one morning that the entire electronic dashboard had been reconfigured overnight, and I had to learn all over again how to drive it. Oh, and Musk is depraved.
But those are caveats few thirty-year-olds pay attention to.
So I’m shopping again. What do I want this time? The interior all recycled, a range of at least 260 miles – I want to stretch by then anyway – good design, and under $40,000 before the $7,500 rebate. The Chinese BYD costs under $10,000 but so far it’s only permitted to supply buses and trucks in the US. The new Bolt, known as the Tesla Killer, is around $30,000, with no ridiculous bullet-proof sheathing like the Cybertruck that I saw on 14th street in New York last week. I love the lights on the Rivian. In a recent Good Housekeeping article, my friend Brett recommends the 2024 $36,000 Volvo EX30, but I’d like to lease something more experimental, like the 2024 Aptera that runs 40 miles solely on solar with only three wheels. If only I could get into it.
Electric cars can now charge your home, convert into trucks via an extra battery, offer an augmented reality display and a backseat lounge area, a dog window and a tank turn – you get the idea. Jetpacks! I already dodge electric scooters tearing up the streets. Electric semis have hit the road, with electric school buses as reported a year ago on “This American Life,” whole fleets that move children around without shortening their lives with exhaust – and roaming power re-suppliers are in the works. The conservative press is acting like grandma standing in the kitchen swearing she’d never plug something into a socket to toast her bread instead of turning bread on a fork in the fireplace. For goodness sake, internal combustion engine cars (ICE) burst into flames 61 times more frequently than electric cars! Forget video, smart watches, AI. Watching this unfolding race to curb our carbon addiction, invention by invention, gives me hope that we can actually save humans and every other species from the juggernaut of climate disaster.
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[1] https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/why-nikola-teslas-greatest-achievement-may-be-in-niagara-falls/