Who Killed the Electric Car? Those Darn Redneck Rural Idiots, That's Who!

If there is no other benefit to living in another country, it’s this: living in another country grants you insights into your own society you might have missed out, either because you were living in the middle of the forest so you could only see the trees, or because you had nothing to compare it to.

This economic crisis has just been loads of fun, though I’m still expecting the sky to fall at any second. I’m being flippant, of course-I do not have a mortgage, or a family, or a retirement plan. I only have a college loan, and whatever expenditures I rack up in the present. There is also something to be said for working for the Japanese government. The Japanese business “culture,” until recent times, really leaned towards lifelong employment. If you got a job there, you had a job there for life (unless you quit.) This came with the disadvantages of hierarchy and at the expense of maybe turning you into a salary man slave, but lay-offs were unheard of. This has been changing (the loss of permanent employment is one of the reasons for all the crazies dropping children off of high rises, so says Japanese newspapers), but the attitude is still pretty prevalent in government. Even with Japan in a deep recession (according to the BBC World News, Dec. 9th podcast) JETs have a guaranteed job.* If they choose to terminate the position because of lack of money, they’ll wait until after you leave, and just not hire a new person. Also, learning English, and learning it from a native speaker, are such a hallmark of the Educational board, for every high school position they slash, they make one that’s elementary-school specific instead.

Anyway, I’m prone to reading far too many English newspapers, and a recent editorial in the New York Times sent me on a thinking spree. In it, the author discussed how the government should let the Detroit 3 fall through, and not bail them out as they did the banks. (My call is Congress was leaning towards no bailout, until the current strike in Illinois by workers who were laid-off sans benefits, because the Bank of America, who received-what was it?-$25 million in bailout money cut off credit to their company. Now Congress might look really stupid… or class-ist… if it bails out the well-to-do money lending banks, but let’s the blue collar auto industry swing.)

The writer spends enough of the article drooling over electric cars and opining how Car 2.0 will be to the iPod what Car 1.0 was to the CD player (or something) to get a hefty amount of criticism in the comments. I actually read the articles for the comments-I wish every article came with them equipped. (I’d have quite an earful to give on the Greek rioters.) For years, my generation has been told over and over how awesome electric cars are, how clean, how efficient!, and that if the Big Bad 3 just hadn’t killed them, we’d be saving the environment and there’d be world peace and all that. I agree that there needs to be a deep infrastructural change in America, but the more I hear of the electric car, the more I think it might not be it.

Living in Japan, I’ve come to love the train system. It’s pretty efficient, reliable, and cheap. Railways cover much of the nation, it’s very organized, and it’s often regarded as one of the best in the world. However, here in Shikoku… it’s still not very popular. The majority of people I see riding the trains are either children/teenagers, or elderly people. This might not be true in and around the big cities, but for being a society that is world-renown for their trains and their biking, there are still a heck of a lot of cars. I’d wager that if high schoolers didn’t have to travel to their school, buses and trains would lose half their revenue.

I bring this up because several comments remarked on how Japanese car companies are whopping American butt-and yet Japanese companies don’t make hybrid or electric cars either, even though the nation is small enough that one of the biggest draw backs to electric cars might not be noticeable (because of the weak battery power, they are very short range.) The places cited by comments as “electric car paradise” is Europe. I can’t speak for that, as I’ve only lived in the US and Japan, but I can say this… comments also, I’d estimate 70% of the time, add in the same breath as “Europeans are so much more enlightened and awesome and wonderful because they have electric car companies” that America would be so much better (ie, like Europe) if we just rode our bikes more.

It suggests to me that one of the biggest impasses we face as a country is the divide not only between the rich and the poor, but the urban and rural. Uh… you ever lived in a town that was not a major city? I imagine riding your bike in Seattle or Chicago is a heck of a lot more efficient than riding it in the middle of Wisconsin. A bike ride from my house to the university took about 20 minutes, in good weather-and I lived pretty close to the university. One of the biggest annoyances of living in Japan IS my reliance on bikes. You can’t carry a whole lot, the weather isn’t always agreeable (in 6 months, I’ve gotten caught in more rainstorms and come home soaked than I care to count), and it takes half an hour just to go to the bank, grocery store, and back home because they’re in such opposite directions.

I don’t know the future of transportation in the US, but living in Japan has certainly given me an interesting angle on it.

And to anyone that suggests that as a rural resident I should be forced to ride my bike for hours just within my town in the below-freezing weather and four feet high icy conditions of Wisconsin because YOU didn’t want to bail out the auto industry and YOU live in a comfortable city where everything is close and handy… just… shut up.