MISCmedia for 5/10/00
A Premature Plug

BEFORE TODAY'S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It's Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

THE ELECTRIC CAR is one of those Inevitable Great Ideas that's been due Any Day Now for decades. (I rode in a Sears-sponsored demonstration of such a car way back in the summer of 1979!)

Now, just in time for the return of high gas prices, a Major Auto Maker is not only vowing to put some electrics out but is even advertising them on prime-time network TV.

Various independent manufacturers have, of course, come out with various electric vehicles over the years. Some were little more than slightly oversized golf carts, which found their most popular uses in gated suburbs or other private-property situations. Others were big and/or fast enough to run on regular surface streets, at least for short periods of time, and attracted a few environmentally-conscious buyers willing to pay the extra cost of a non-mass-production vehicle.

It took a recently-adopted addendum to Calif.'s ever-more-stringent smog laws for the major car companies to not only promise that they'd offer electrics but that they'd do what it takes to push a certain number of such units to dealer lots and from there to end users.

GM and Honda have been test-marketing electrics and part-electrics at dealers in the Fool's-Golden State. Honda also promises a gas/electric hybrid vehicle later this year.

But Ford's advertising its new Think nameplate (not to be confused with computer-company slogans past or present) as not merely hesitantly leasing a few units in one state but as boldly and nationally rolling out a line of all-new vehicles designed from the ground up to run reasonably fast, over reasonable distances, with reasonable acceleration, carrying a reasonable passenger-cargo load.

But if you go to the Think website, you find out that they're rolling out only a little limited-range vehicle and a motor-assisted bicycle now. The snazzy, ultramodern street vehicle shown in the Think TV commercials won't be in a showroom near you 'til 2002 at the earliest.

Let's hope they work the production details out quickly--or that one of the indie alterna-car makers takes advantage of Ford's product-awareness-building campaign and gets its own product out to a larger customer base at a smaller cost than electrics have now.

(Some caveats: While electric vehicles don't directly belch forth carbon monoxide, the electricity they run on may come from polluting, nuke-waste-producing, or salmon-killing generation plants, depending on your location. And they do little to solve traffic jams, suburban sprawl, and other harmful auto-related side effects. (Though their currently limited range might encourage more close-in communities eventually.)

TOMORROW: Girls rule in school. So what's new?

ELSEWHERE:

• "Cool Librarians of Fact and Fiction"....
• A paid-access sex site with a difference--Nakkid Nerds!...

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Could a split Microsoft be a bigger threat than a whole one?
• American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
• Modern art as capitalist tool.
• Prepare to say goodbye to the Children's Hospital thrift store.
• Parts one and two of Matthew Stadler's look at urban dreamers in the distant and more-recent past.
• Dissecting the Way-New Left.
• Parts one and two of luxury-box stadia as a sort of Utopian vision.
• Harper's Magazine discovers those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
• The new world capital of photography.
• Strange stuff in the Seattle Times.
• The continuing story of CNBC.
• James Twitchell-- one English prof who (hearts) marketing.
• USA Today turns 18, tries to start looking more mature.
• Announcing the launch of MISCmedia Radio.
• Parts one and two of a poet's fascination with the business press.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
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