Car Science: actually good
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What are the similarities between a newsletter-writing journalist and a 1980s Lada? Well, we're both older than the fall of the Soviet Union and require a sharp blast of liquid petroleum gas before going anywhere. No, I haven't been huffing fumes, I just found out that dry shampoo's propellent gas is LPG, which feels like kind of a wild discovery but I guess a lot of the standard aerosol carriers, like alcohols, wouldn't really work. Some hair science to kick us all off, there.
This is nominally the news edition but it's been a slow news week, by which I mean I haven't really been on Twitter very much because I've been binge-reading about semiconductors for a thing someone's paying me for so I have no idea if the whole automotive industry has collapsed or whatever.
Car Science tends towards the physical or chemical ends of science, which is highly fraudulent of me seeing as my degree is actually in social science. Or more accurately in why humans keep fucking each other up in devastatingly hideous ways, which as a field gets called 'international relations' but to be honest we'd probably be doing a lot better if we started with that description.
I'm also aware, especially after the turbobummer that was the last edition, that Car Science tends to be on the bad news spectrum. That's a little because being into cars is the evil-coded version of transport nerdery and also because the planet is dying and things get worse every day and it feels as though there are very slim chances and almost no hope because factually that is what the science is pointing to. So, that's horrific.
As someone whose mental health can best be described as "bad" I can't pretend I don't struggle with that. As someone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella things feel very bleak right now, in addition to the climate crisis, spiralling cost of living, fragility of existence, etc. We're heading towards this year's pride month of June in a human rights crisis that's being fuelled by a culture war commanded by people who don't know what pronouns are. Bleak.
This Car Science is about being kind.
A problem from hell
One of the books from my degree that I've kept hold of and still read bits of occasionally is A Problem From Hell by Samantha Power. It's about the US' attempts to navigate the genocides of the 1990s or rather, the non-attempts, the failures to intervene. It's exceptionally well researched and written and although it's obviously very heavy, both in subject matter and weight of pages, Power's unflinching exposure of the cost of working out ways to do nothing is as good a piece of journalism as you'll ever read. It's an important piece of testimony because it confronts the immoral realities of spectatorship.
Genocidal wars are, for the most part although not exclusively, things for state-level actors to consider their role in. If America stands by and lets the Balkans run with blood, what does it mean for its future on the world stage or its concept of itself? The last-standing Cold War hyperpower, in theory the US won; decades of interventionism were suddenly complicated by the 'right action' not being clearly defined as whatever the Soviets weren't, an ideological widowing.
It's not overcooking it to say that the current culture wars involve ideologies set on eliminating a group or groups of people: trans people, LGBTQ+ people more broadly. The rhetoric is focussed on denying medical care, forcibly detransitioning people or banning any expression of queerness up to and including being spoken about because these are the respectable versions of forcing people not to exist. The ones that can be broadcast on social media and news networks, that can be signed into legislature without invoking any conventions.
Because it is currently being afforded that respectable territory, it is mostly not state-level actors involved in considering whether they need to intervene. It's brands and media and especially where the two intersect.
Last year in June Ford Europe concepted the #VeryGayRaptor in response to someone saying that the Ford blue paint job on one was "very gay." The level of fragility it takes to decide generic Ford blue is emasculating a pickup aside, this was broadly a hit with both people who like rad paint jobs and decent human beings.
Naturally, it was seen as a negative by others. When Ford went further and actually brought the Very Gay Raptor to life and filmed an advert with it it mostly didn't immediately ignite the culture wars touchpaper, possibly because most of the activations were in Europe but this year it has, rediscovered by people who can't stop getting mad about a rainbow on a truck.
It's an admirable stand for Ford to take. It's also extremely good business sense: Ford currently has a major interest in making itself an attractive employer; diversity and inclusion policies are crucial to getting people to want to work for you especially if you, say, need trained people aged 44-21 to uproot their lives to work at technical plants. Millennials want to work at places with very gay Raptors because the existence of inclusion policies, even if they aren't in any groups protected under them, suggests the likelihood of better healthcare, parental leave, workplace safety policies, etc.
The US currently has a labour shortage, rather than a surplus. Unemployment is at a record low and people are leaving and not going back to jobs that suck, like working on the railways and rigid shift work. A rainbow Raptor and a policy not to fire someone for being trans is a pretty cheap way to convince applicants through the door of your new multi-billion-dollar megafacilities as the car industry undergoes the massive change to electrification.
The people who don't like it aren't part of that change, they're actively fighting it. This deep-dive into the NADA (North American Auto-Dealers Association) annual meet up might fill any holes you've got in your life for rich people doing terrible stuff after the Succession finale. Ghoulish profiteers with massive legal protections, US car dealers have been scalping consumers (and are looking for more ways to do so, including not letting automakers publish guide prices) for decades and are mad about the prospect of not doing so in future. And they're gleefully funding Republican party politics because the type of conservatism that's anti-LGBTQ+ people aligns remarkably well with the type of conservatism that's anti-electric vehicle, even when it's in a Twitter space with Elon Musk.
The culture war is both sides of the Atlantic, though. Ford UK sponsors documentaries on Channel 4, which means its sponsorship ran last night alongside Gender Wars, an intensely ideological documentary about Kathleen Stock and her activism opposing the rights of trans people in the UK. Ford says that its sponsorship does not equal endorsement which, of course, is true. But that's still the blue oval sitting neatly in the idents saying that this production is being broadcast on Ford's dime.
There is no both-sidesing it out of this. As PR gaffes go, this is a very small one for Ford but not one the UK office will have been anticipating when it signed up to sponsor Channel 4's award-winning documentary programming. Cars have always been identity politics and sold on that; from early electric vehicle adverts advocating them as perfect for your wife because of their short range and relative safety to the kind of hellbent GOP posturing around pickups now. The brand you choose to drive, the car you choose to drive, the trim you have it in are all social signifiers whether that's grand touring executive or shitbox slut.
Brands didn't expect to walk into this and it's not a problem of their own creation. Most sane people either have no idea the Very Gay Raptor or Kathleen Stock exist or don't care but it's now a double-sided frontline of conservatives calling for Ford to be immediately dissolved for endorsing child abuse and desperate people in very vulnerable situations begging companies not to associate themselves with attacks on them.
Seeing it from another perspective
Here's a strange piece of research that came up last week: seeing things from other's point of view dates all the way back to the dinosaurs. Actually that's a predatory (or predated) advantage, in being able to work out what something else can see or might be distracted by but even the paper concedes it's the start of something approaching empathy.
Geometrical gaze following is very important in driving; knowing when you are in someone's blind spot or what you'll be able to see at a different point in the road. Way back in the early days of Car Science we looked at the glorious meme format of sticking eyes on autonomous cars so that pedestrians and other motorists were more aware of where the vehicle was intending to go.
We use visual signifiers like the direction a car is pointing to suggest what its next move will be but we also check where the driver is looking. Without that visual cue, it's much harder to read. Do cars with googly eyes on solve the considerably bigger issue that autonomous driving does not exist? No. But the research shows it actually does reassure people, possibly by making it clear this vehicle is ridiculous. You know, like a Tesla letting out a fart noise just before it annihilates your wing mirror.
There's an interesting study from 2021 that asks the question: should autonomous cars mimic human driving? People don't trust autonomous vehicles not to behave erratically but then people absolutely behave erratically. Looking at various driving scenarios, 46 participants described their own behaviours and what they'd hope an AV would do.
People who were onboard with autonomous vehicles wanted them to behave more aggressively, like a human. The majority of participants, however, wanted them to be more cautious. We talked a few weeks back about defining what makes an aggressive driver and the difficulty in recognising that, unless they're shouting out the window and gesturing at you.
All that identity politics in cars does define driving style; BMW and Audi drivers have a reputation because the cars are intended to drive a certain way specifically to give you the sense of ego that they do. Nissan SUVs seem to be sold with the condition that the driver loses that geometric gaze awareness we've had since the jurassic period. The plucky Renault Twingo is driven by people who don't value their lives or bodywork.
Let's buy into fiction for a moment and imagine autonomous vehicles are near-future viable as a concept: what does your choice of AI chauffeur say? And what will you do if it does something you wouldn't?
In the culture wars era autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to pick routes based on the type of neighbourhoods they go through. If your child gets picked up by the robot driver and asks to grab food on the way home it might be from anti-LGBTQ+ funding Chick-fil-a - or living mas homo Taco Bell. Car doesn't care and it's likely to be a sponsorship opportunity for companies selling the software either way.
In reality AI can barely coherently read the prejudices it was programmed with and has been repeatedly caught lying when it doesn't know something. Because it's just a programme that succeeds at its task when it does what you've asked it to and doesn't have morals. If lying was bad, why would it be a way to complete the task?
What does this have to do with anything? Well, this is a little off Car Science's beat but there was research published last week that it turns out, all around in the world and in all circumstances, people do actually choose to be kind far more often than they don't.
The hippie bit
Small acts of kindness, it turns out, cross all cultural barriers. Yeah, even in the late capitalist collapse of the west it turns out we're still routinely, regularly kind to each other.
People help each other out in small ways seven times more than they refuse to. And the behaviour is hardwired into us somehow, to notice someone asking for help - directly or by struggling with something - see how to help them and do it. Some of that is that flat, dinosaur-style geometric gaze empathy; someone is trying to reach something that they can't and you can, you pass it to them rather than thinking "well I can reach it, why can't they?"
This is perhaps useful to know, in an increasingly divided world. Some small optimism for us as a species. It's also something that we'd need to teach generative or intelligent systems of the future; if dinosaurs had a crude form of empathy, then human civilisation is built on this much more advanced form of cooperation. It's why we can construct supply chains and production lines and ultra-complex systems that somehow lead to the endgame of grown people crying over a rainbow pickup.
It's relatively easy to teach a vehicle to navigate a route and even to assess hazards around it. Most road markings are actually quite clear and the other vehicles around it will tend to be moving at steady speeds or in ways that are relatively predictable in terms of what an automaton might need to detect to protect itself.
Teaching a robot to share is a lot harder. A little like the comfort of the right wing with outright lying: if something works, it's hard to explain to a machine why it shouldn't and idealogues are mechanical thinking for humans.
Car Science isn't really about providing the answers to this because frankly, I'm not fucking smart enough. But there is something in cooperation, in instinctively looking for ways to offer help and being aware of the circumstances of others relative to yourself, being more natural than the opposite.
An irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-this note on Things I've Been Doing
I don't know, maybe you don't want to read this bit. That's why it's at the end, there's nothing else after this other than the bit where I lie about when the next edition will come out and what it will be about so feel free to tab back to Twitter or find something else to put off replying to your emails with.
Some things I've been doing are what you could laughably call 'actual science' or at least, science in action beyond ...I'm not going to defame research by suggesting this newsletter passes for some sort of literature review. Anyway, a bit of that. I don't think it's making me less depressed but it is a hobby.
I'm working on three projects currently, one of which is extracting metals from disposable vapes. I initially was going to just get the lithium out of the batteries, which is a combination of fairly easy if you don't mind it being mixed in with some other stuff and increasingly difficult if you're trying to turn it back into a separated state. Then I realised there's shitloads of copper and gold in there, too, which are slightly easier to get out anyway and so we are - and by 'we are' I very much mean 'I am' - going spelunking to find out what we can get out of which vapes and in what quantities. I have already hurt myself three times doing this so it's a great project.
Then there's what I'm hesitantly calling Fun With Hessian which is me trying to make a decent composite without using anything grotesquely toxic. So far I've come up with a lot of questionable theories about epoxy, slightly burned myself on some carbon fibre and spent one strange afternoon trying to find broken bits of road to make a youtube point about the difference between aggregates and composites so I think we can comfortably agree that if nothing else, this project is definitely making me cooler and more fun to hang out with.
The third thing I'm doing is basically the natural conclusion to Car Science's recurring theme of rearranging hydrocarbons, which is that I wondered if it was possible to turn shampoo into fuel. A lot of shampoo is made out of petrochemicals and so, of course, is the bottle but unsurprisingly no one tries to do this because it is fucking stupid. My bedroom now, more than ever before, resembles somewhere you should immediately call the police if someone takes you back there but it's not like we can pretend that was much of a risk for me anyway. This one is harder than the others but there is research out there about how to break down long-chain fatty alcohols and convert them to fuel. Should you do this in your bedroom? Absolutely not.
I don't know if any of these projects are making me less depressed. I guess that's not really how little projects work, is it; as valid though occupational therapy is as a field I don't think anyone has been suggesting working through your self esteem issues by manhandling rare earth metals on a duvet. They're definitely not earning me any money or contributing to finding more work. But I guess they are something to think about and there's a distinct lack of women in their late 30s setting fire to things in their bedrooms on YouTube so I guess that's a market waiting to be cornered.
Anyway see you on Friday with a bit about a roundabout in Michigan. Or you know, probably like Tuesday with something else entirely.
Hazel
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