Ben Kraal

No one killed the electric car, it was dead on arrival | Car News Blog at Motor Trend (via ninakix)

I wonder if there’s even more to it than that. Bruno Latour, that crazy French philosopher (yes, I know, tautology) wrote a great, weird, book about an amazing public transport technology that was developed in Paris in the late 70s and early 80s, Aramis. Aramis was one of those ever-present ideas in urban transport about having individual pods that could build themselves up into a train and then, as pods reached their destination, split off, leaving the rest of the train intact. It all worked, they had demo lines set up and everyone was very impressed. And then it died. It’s not just that the technology wasn’t up to scratch, though it probably wasn’t. And it’s not just that it was scuppered for political reasons, or that the money ran out, or any number of individual things. It was a whole bunch of small set-backs, power struggles, technological issues and umpteen other pebble-sized things that all interacted together to result in failure.

So, for example, imagine if the EV1 was launched in Europe, rather than America, and in London and Paris particularly, rather than Los Angeles. The imagine it wasn’t sold to people who had a 40 mile round trip commute from the outer LA ‘burbs to their industrial park campus, but rather from some apartment 5 or 10 miles to their inner city office building (let’s ignore why they’re driving instead of catching public transport). The different socio-urban context suddenly makes an electric car that can only travel 40 miles in urban driving much more sensible.

With the EV1, it’s not that the technology was bad per se, it was just not suited to the task it was given. It doesn’t make the failure any less spectacular, and at least the article gets away from the traditional deterministic false dichotomy of failure-is-from-social-reasons success-is-for-technical-reasons. But I still don’t think it was just because the batteries weren’t up to task.