New and Old #112
Friday roundup and commentary
We knew modern electric cars emerged in the late 1990s, led by the pioneering GM EV1—until we found a top-secret electric Chevy Corvette prototype, built by Motorola and predating the EV1, sitting at a salvage yard in Illinois last summer.
Further down I mention making sure the date on a piece isn’t April 1. This is one of those pieces. A real-life untold story of something that is still very much within memory. What other untold stories are out there?
This was no hobby project—the electric conversion was professionally done in the early 1990s with bespoke Motorola parts, elegantly preserving the C4 Corvette’s stock appearance, a far cry from the average homebrew EV projects of the era. The documents indicated power outputs on par with contemporary supercars; other bits of tech were so far ahead of their time, they wouldn’t appear in production electric cars again for decades.
Just looking at the damn thing, it was obviously a passion project made by brilliant people who genuinely loved cars. And yet no record of the Motorola Corvette exists anywhere online. It was a ghost—until now.
That’s just the intro, and this is just part one of three. Read them all. I will say two things. One, Motorola’s attitude toward electric cars reminds me a lot of Kodak’s attitude toward digital cameras back in the ’90s. And two, you wonder how much more advanced technology would be today if the smartest people just had the time and money to do their thing.
Our National French Fry Decline, The Melt, Jason Diamond, May 17, 2023
This piece, superficially a complaint about concealed overly-small French fry portions, captures just about exactly what I’ve been feeling lately about buying things, and the actual sense of loss at what has changed quasi-post-pandemic; the feeling that a whole ways of doing business and in some ways of living is vanishing.
Skimping on them [fries] seems really off to me. So I asked the server. I didn’t do it in front of the people I was dining with. I was getting up to use the bathroom, and asked, “Hey, what’s the deal with the fries? I’ve never seen that wax paper trick.”
The server shrugged. “That’s just the way it is,” they said before walking away.
That answer and all the words I’ve typed about French fries add up to something.
And then this bit, which reminds me so much of what I write about both buffets and classical urbanism:
The article is from 1927, nearly a century ago. It’s called “Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore.” It’s a proto-good SEO headline, and it’s actually what the piece is about. Wilder missed the way a match being struck smelled in the old days because in 1927 “They use new materials. During the war they ran out of man materials, which were replaced by different, cheaper ones. Now people are staying with them. That is progress. A world has disappeared and will never, ever come back.”
Give this a read and think about it.
For all intents and purposes, the “paper dart” was the “paper airplane” — the only thing that changed was the name.
This is one of those pieces where I do two things. First, make sure the date isn’t April 1. Second, wish I had written it. I don’t want to spoil or explain it. It’s a very fun read!
I also spent a lot of time raging against Austin’s car dependence. In the (lovely) house where I stayed, there was no way to access grocery stores or cafes on foot or by using the bike in the garage; all errands required using the car generously left behind at my disposal. I was so grateful for the car and I know historically, this amazing feat of technology was intended to enhance my personal sense of freedom, but in all my life I had never felt less free.
I don’t think my frustration was with the car per se, it was with the way our entire built environment has been reconfigured around the assumption that driving is the only appropriate mode of self-transport. My time living in New York City and traveling Europe had exposed me to the convenience (and tradeoffs) of multi-modal transit, to the joy and dignity of being allowed to choose what was best for me. Sitting in that house in Austin, I found myself deprived of such freedom, confronted with a more hostile landscape and forced to navigate an abundance of undesirable opportunity costs.
After having some car trouble:
Sitting there, my mind—still in the throes of reverse culture shock—stumbled around trying to find a solution. I was grateful for these kind Texans, but looking out the window at a highway full of cars, I couldn’t help but consider the role of the built environment in my ability to take care of myself right then and there. If I was in Europe, I compared internally, the solution to this kind of situation would have probably involved walking or taking a train to a nearby town, grabbing a spot at a hostel, and walking to a local pub for a beer and cheap food. The built environment around me would make my stranded state much easier to navigate with dignity and resourcefulness…. [my emphasis]
I didn’t have the language at the time, but the effects of single-use zoning, car-based design, and sprawl were all hitting me in the face. There was no public transit that could get me across the highway (let alone home). The amount of cars and traffic made it impossible to walk to a McDonald’s, let alone a café. And there were no hostels to crash for the night, which became necessary: car repairs would have to wait until morning.
Read the whole thing. I think some people—the people who need to read this piece—can’t actually distinguish self-reliance and community from handouts and dependence.
Related Reading:
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Yes, I always love what Tiffany Owens writes, and that two-part essay on being stranded was fantastic.