“Who’s Killing the Plug-In Hybrid?” Feature, 1/14
Warranties In Our Interest
I think the tone of your article “Who’s Killing the Plug-In Hybrid,”
is a little unfair to the State of California. In most cases,
conversion to a plug-in hybrid will void the manufacturer warranty (see
for instance http://www.toyota.com/html/hybridsynergyview/2006/fall/battery.html).
It is certainly in the interest of the State of California to ensure
that our state-mandated ten years/150K miles warranty is not voided by
vendors selling snake oil.
While a plug-in hybrid is a good idea, taking a conservative
approach to modification to an emissions system, and requiring that the
state-mandated warranty be preserved by warranty-voiding procedures
(like conversion to plug-in hybrid) seems like a pretty reasonable
thing for a state agency to do.
Charles Shiflett, Berkeley
Coal vs. Gasoline
I think it’s specious and fallacious to refer to miles-per-gallon
when liquid is not the only energy source put into the vehicle.
How much coal is burned during a four-hour charge?
How does the State of California figure out how much highway tax to
add to your electric bill?
Bob Marsh, Berkeley
Smells Like Greed
Another California Air Resources Board scam. Your story made my
blood boil. If we are to be a model state about green jobs, and a place
that will steward triple bottom line businesses, why should we hamper
the inventors of a better future? 3Prong Power should be included in a
green bailout package.
Isn’t it enough to have one’s vehicle inspected at the SMOG check?
Smells like greed to me.
Janet Pomeroy, Oakland
The Electric Car Myth
This article overlooks the enduring myth behind electric/plug-in
hybrid vehicles — electricity has to come from somewhere, and if
everyone drives an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle it will most
likely be coming from coal-fired generation plants with considerable
energy loss during transmission from the distant plants (NIMBY) to your
driveway. Drive less (live closer to work, work closer to home, use
public transit, walk and bike more). The article offers no analysis of
how many miles per year one would have to drive to make this conversion
cost effective over the life of the car (total life, not the four years
before it’s traded up for the next shiny object to come along). The
catalytic converter issue could be fixed with a thermal electric “tea
cozy” approach that should reduce or eliminate “cold starts.” That
these vehicles can’t exceed 34 mph without the gas kicking on seems
easily remedied. I rarely see anyone in the Bay Area driving below 35
mph outside of Berkeley.
Kenneth J. Craik, Oakland
An Important Topic
This is a great article!
It did seem to imply that all plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), or maybe just
all conversions, are limited to 34 mph and modest acceleration without
the engine, which is not true; converters have even managed to drive
Prius conversions electrically to 52 mph despite Toyota’s limiting
software.
I believe that CARB wrote their proposed rules as if the PHEV
conversion industry is a huge, mature industry like auto manufacturing,
which has a billion-dollar cost of entry and five-year development
cycles. In contrast, all conversion manufacturers, except Hymotion once
it was bought by A123, are entrepreneurial, funded largely by sales of
evolving, often one-of-a-kind conversions.
The proposed CARB rules would require all design, testing, and
certification efforts to be done up front before selling any
conversions. Because this conversion industry is so embryonic, the
market hasn’t been established and suppliers — especially smaller
battery manufacturers without the cash to compete for auto manufacturer
contracts — have no real-world automotive experience with their
components for which CARB would require proof of longevity. This means
sufficient venture capital is hard to come by, so innovators must for
now remain largely self-funded, making cost of entry prohibitive with
such rules.
As mentioned in the article, the rules would (for good reasons, but
with draconian results) require converters to include SULEV-level
warranties. Worse (and not mentioned), for vehicles six years old or
newer at the time of conversion, conversion would reset the vehicle’s
mileage and date of manufacture back to zero for the warranty!
One more thing, Onboard Diagnostics (OBD), required of all vehicle
manufacturers, would be required to be fully understood, modified as
necessary, and extended by a converter. The problem is that OBD
internals, including the information needed to be sure to avoid
lessening the effectiveness of the OEM OBD, appears to be proprietary
data not available to anyone but the original manufacturer and
government entities.
For more specifics related to the original CARB proposed rules
— though not the minor modifications that came as later
amendments, please see my August 2008 formal comments to CARB at
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/977.html.
Ronald Gremban, CalCars Technical Lead, Corte Madera
No Support for Electric
I’ve been driving an all-electric car for the past seven years, but
at this point there is no support infrastructure at all for EVs, thanks
mostly to CARB’s refusal to uphold the legislature’s intent for ZEV’s,
which started way back in 1990. There is no justification for such
rigid and uncompromising rules, which only stifle innovation and
provide little actual consumer protection. Plug-in hybrid customers
know what they are doing — we are adults, we don’t need the state
to mandate a ten-year warranty or require completely unnecessary
testing.
And I support 3Prong also because they advocate using renewable PV
power to fuel these plug-in hybrids, which reduces CO2 emissions even
further!
Gary Gerber, President, Sun Light & Power Company,
Berkeley
Speak Up
How can citizens send comments to the Air Resources Board about
this? Now is the time to make our voices heard. We as individuals and
as a state need to support people and organizations who are working
hard to get us off petroleum.
Rachel Hollowgrass, Oakland
Electricity Isn’t Free
Robert Gammon’s fawning paean to the gods of cool, righteous cars is
classic logic of omission. By driving one of those plug-in hybrids of
his praise we can get as much as three times as many miles per gallon
as the usual old but really already quite excellent Prius, no?
Well if you’re counting miles but not gallons while the car is
running on electricity, isn’t that pretending like electricity is free
and you don’t have to be burning or tapping oil, dams, nuclear, wind,
Âwhatever  to produce the energy? In other words, isn’t he
kind of cheating to skip comment on the electricity and how much
energy, money, and climate change that costs? Not to mention car
accident deaths, paving farmland and paradise, filling up and spreading
out cities with parking lots and parking structures, freeway
interchanges, etc. Using his logic, driving a 100 percent electric car
you’d be getting infinite miles per gallon and spending no money at all
to drive your car.
The real issue besides why would someone defend cars so
thoughtlessly is why spend $9,000 to $14,000 a year on a car at all,
being about the USA average, and not instead walk, bike, and take
transit? Well you can’t walk, bike, and take transit everywhere because
we’ve built our scattered, low-density cities around cars. So do what’s
possible, those of you close enough to what you need, and for those
“structurally dependent” on cars, gradually changing city structure
toward more compact development near transit is the real way to plug-in
to energy and climate solutions.
Richard Register, Oakland
Editor’s Note
As we reported in our January 28 issue, (“Saving the Plug-In
Hybrid,”) the California Air Resources Board voted late last month not
to subject the plug-in hybrid industry to a series of proposed
regulations that might have bankrupted small operators such as
Berkeley’s 3Prong Power.
“A Night of Anger,” Seven Days, 1/14
Flaming the Fire
The Express is perpetuating falsehoods and irresponsible
sensationalism with its uncritical repetition of the Chronicle‘s
misquoting of Nia Sykes regarding the BART protests. Even a cursory
fact-checking by the Express would have revealed Nia Sykes’
January 9th letter to the Chronicle editor clarifying her
position and explaining how she was misquoted. I doubt that the
Express attempted to contact Nia Sykes for clarification.
Instead, the Express chose to further inflame the situation by
misquoting her, and even going further by characterizing her speech as
a “snort.” Such is not responsible journalism but rather irresponsible
sensationalism.
Dave Abercrombie, Oakland
Editor’s Note
In fact, Nia Sykes has not responded to several requests for an
interview from this newspaper.
Oakland Deserves BART Love
Just what Oakland didn’t need — to have to cover for BART cops
screwing up on BART property that just happened to be in the O.
I hope Oakland gets some serious BART love (cleaner stations?
cleaner bathrooms? brighter parking lots? station agents that care?)
for covering their respective … the last couple of weeks.
Early, decisive, thoughtful action by BART could have prevented much
of this.
Doug Johnson, Oakland
No Black Progress
“Decades of progress?” Is he serious? What progress? Progress for
black-owned businesses? For the majority, their situation is very
tenuous. Many are being pushed to the brink, forced to survive as
part-time, marginal businesses — for example, like some at the
Ashby Flea Market. In truth, the majority of middle-class black
families are on a down-wardly mobile path. And we’re now witnessing an
economic meltdown that has already stripped billions of dollars from
black, Latino, white, and other home buyers in the subprime fiasco.
While relatively small numbers of blacks have made real gains, today
the majority of African Americans face pre-1960 levels of enforced
segregation, high infant mortality rates, schools that resemble
prisons, and the highest incarceration rate in the world —
approaching one million people! In addition, the rise of fundamentalist
religion has had terrible consequences. Evangelical literalist
Christianists like Rick Warren are welcomed by the new president, while
abortion has become an almost nonexistent “choice” for women without
means. And on top of all this, many from poor and oppressed communities
are being groomed (in large part through fundamentalist churches) to
support reactionary, politically backward attacks on the people like
Prop 8.
And then there is police brutality and murder. Over a hundred people
are killed by police each year in California. Thousands of black people
(and others) have been killed by police forces in this country since
the 1990s. This trend is intensifying. And on New Year’s Day, a
horrific police execution of a young black man was carried out on a
train platform on the eve of the Obama inauguration (the
president-elect ignored this shooting). A murder whose aftermath is now
reverberating across the country.
Speaking of the protests in Oakland: the mood at the demonstrations
was in no way “dark,” unless you’re speaking of the actions of the
mayor and the police, trying their best to smother, demoralize, and
literally beat down the real and righteous anger of masses of people,
an anger that has been way too long suppressed. The mood in the
protests was actually: angry, defiant, liberating, determined —
and all absolutely justified. The protestors seized the moral
high-ground, and people like the mayor had no choice but to scurry away
on the defensive (and can anyone believe the Oakland city council woman
comparing the protestors to George Bush attacking Iraq — has the
world gone crazy?). There would have been little notice taken to this
murder if people hadn’t done what they did on those nights.
This killing is nothing new. This happens all the time to African
Americans. It is true that this blatant act was captured on cell phone
and video, and people have not been in a mood to ignore this. Doesn’t
it seem like every time a video like this surfaces that the people
being beaten or killed by the police are just trying to go about their
lives? They didn’t make any sudden move; they didn’t go for their
pocket; a gun (a “throw-down”) didn’t appear next to their lifeless
body. I call this “the big lie.” It’s a lie that is manufactured. It
comes from a system that cannot bring forward the love, humanity, and
creativity of its people — it can only demoralize them and crush
them.
Another lie: that all of the business people in Oakland condemned
the vandalism. A number of them stated — in newspapers, on radio,
on TV — that they empathized with the protestors — they
shared their outrage and frustration. They were big-minded enough to
put the life of a young African-American man above sweeping up some
glass and filling out an insurance claim! What is it that makes us
human? We are social beings. Should we give a damn that thousands of
people’s lives around the world (many right in our midst) are being cut
short everyday — even in the time it takes you to read this
letter — through malnutrition, disease, wars, state-sanctioned
murder. These deaths are preventable — with human intervention.
But most people don’t intervene. In Oakland, people did intervene. Is
it right to only care whether or not the gala at the Fox Theatre comes
off without a hitch? No, it’s not. A much better world is possible
— let’s struggle for and get clarity on what it will take to make
that better world a reality. Let’s not stop until this is accomplished.
That’s a goal worth caring about, and living for.
Leon Harper, Oakland
Miscellaneous Letters
A Bad Museum Trend
I am very discouraged to see this new trend in museum construction.
At the end of the day, I filled out the online survey, and now I am
left to muse about why I was asked to provide a rating on a 1 to 10
scale as to whether or not I was sufficiently entertained during
my visit to the New Academy of Sciences Complex?Â
I was recently in New Zealand working in Wellington for several
months and visited the New National Te Papa Tongarewa. I came away with
the same impressions: superficial, overdone, under-inspiring. I
find it most disturbing that any museum now has to be a landmark first
and foremost, a destination where the building is what matters, while
the formal exhibits it contains are judged not upon their effectiveness
in elevating consciousness, or in sufficiently informing or inspiring
visitors to collective action in a deep and meaningful way, but rather
on their ability to deliver a reflexive pop-cultural entertainment
experience. Â
I don’t want a museum to feel like a video arcade. Massively arrayed
electronic devices combine with this new tendency toward exhibits built
out of fabulous high-tech materials in an environment of
hyper-stimulation and pseudo-green “sustainable” design elements
to overwhelm the senses and leave visitors stunned and under-informed.
This type of museum space, I’ll call it the “New Museum Model,” tends
to serve the purpose of further green-washing the bling bling
“sustainable technology” overdose which is all the rage these
days.Â
I liked the exhibit of the $ 5,000.00 electric full-suspension
carbon fiber mountain bike with the 24-or-so-mile range (just how many
people can afford to get one of those when they’re making Wal-Mart
wages?)
Keeping the crowd jacked up on eye-candy has subsumed any notion of
exhibit quality or basic resources which provide in-depth
information.
Perhaps most offensive to me and my kids was the fact that, in my
ten-year-old daughter’s words, “Calling one of the gift shops the
‘Junior Lab’ makes zero sense, dad.”
It is a truly obscene notion to suggest that a consumeristic
approach to the museum experience has anything to do with a science
lab, or that buying more useless “stuff” and contributing to the
cultural imperatives of endless overconsumption serves the core mission
of stewardship that should be the institution’s top priority.Â
My kids and I don’t want to come to our public museum spaces and see
an albino alligator in a glassed-in pit and then have the plush toy
version of it — which, by the way, is loaded with volatile
organic compounds, petroleum-based synthetic fibers, is constructed
half-way around the world, and then shipped, warehoused, and handled at
enormous hidden expense — ram-rodded at us for consumption in the
museum’s “Junior Lab.”Â
Come on now! Yes, we all know that you have to generate revenue, but
this all-out assault on the very essence of the museum experience is
revolting. No wonder we have a generation of under-informed consumer
automatons who have attention spans which are only measurable in
milliseconds.
On our walk out of the museum my ten-year-old and I realized that
the most intriguing exhibit of all was what we immediately dubbed the
“Human Tank” — the unavoidable big glass and steel central atrium
which serves as the main food court — after all that’s the most
accurate formal exhibit that the new Academy of Sciences offers to its
visitors — a chance to see ourselves clearly as the central
dominant force behind the coming systemic and cascading ecological
collapses.Â
Can someone, perhaps a CAS Staff Scientist or maybe a Nobel Laureate
Statistician, please tell me and my children what the carbon
footprint for the construction of the “living roof” was, and could you
put it in readily accessible laypersons terms (you know, like how many
as-yet-unidentified-tropical-rainforest-species were forced to the
brink of extinction)? And how might it ever be possible for a
“C-O-M-P-L-E-X” such as the New Academy of Sciences, a space that
promotes the corporate food-court experience/entertainment model over a
comprehensive understanding of the basic food-web and it’s fundamental
interplay with the planet’s biospheres to possibly pay that concealed
collective debt back, EVER?! For the love of the earth what are we
doing here?
Yes, we’ve been there. Done that.
Andrew Carothers-Liske, Oakland
Don’t Be Sheep
In light of the recent troubles what I write here is in many ways
trivial, at least in a current context. I’ll send it all the same, as
it’s an issue worthy of at least a momentary glimmer of
illumination.
I’ve ridden BART for so long the application of the yellow pimpled
strips along the edge of the platform seems a distant memory. Many
riders likely assume the strips, and the black “Board Here” indicators
resident therein have existed since the construction of the system.
They haven’t, but in the time following their pasting I’ve observed
with sadness and frustration the pathologic behavior the black mark
seems to evoke.
You know what I’m talking about. Late at night or on Sundays it’s
chilling to see riders lined up at the marks, waiting for stretches to
board what is with certainty going to be an empty train. On workday
mornings and afternoons the pathology is more manifest and
simultaneously more troublesome. Â Certainly, the train will be
fuller; in fact, the seats will probably already all be taken. But it
is never so full that there’s no room for any of the hapless queued to
board. And yet the line stretches from platform edge to the other side,
complicating passage and blocking escalators. Woe to the poor soul who
seeks to off-board Powell Street at 5 p.m.
By my measure, it seems no less than three-quarters of the
passengers at the platform toe the mark or the back of the person
before them. Are they sheep? Do they live in sheep-fear that a train
will arrive too densely packed to allow them entry? Or are they simply
Rule Abiding Citizens who have interpreted the mark to be their
unbending instruction and consciously heed the command? Or, as
dangerously, are they opportunists, living in a cramped dog-eat-dog
zero-sum world where the only rule for survival is take, lest you be
taken from?
Whatever the explanation, it reflects darkly on Bay Area society. To
those milling about the structural columns or leaning near the
elevators — take up your standard! Disrupt the queues! Perhaps by
so doing the veil will fall from their eyes, and the line-standers will
come to understand that there’s room on the train for everybody and
maybe if they weren’t in such a fearful frantic hyper-protective rush
they might actually enjoy living a bit more.
Which sure as shooting would make them more pleasant to be
around.
Markus Niebanck, Oakland
Extend Shop Hours
Am I the only one frustrated by the 10-6 hours the East Bay? I
appreciate our community’s relaxed spirit, it’s a lot of why I chose to
locate here, but why do so many businesses operate on schedules that
only serve these highly flexible people?
I work a regular 9-5 job, and have the disposable income to show for
it. I want to buy local. Yet I can’t even hope to patron a lot of
stores around my neighborhood because they’re closed when I leave for
work and shut when I return. Even the Alameda County Food Bank is
booked for any time I might be able to volunteer during the next two
months.
Even in a recession, these establishments apparently don’t want my
money or my help.
Ruth Miller, Oakland
Corrections
In our October 8 art review (“Bush, Unbashed”) we incorrectly
spelled Tony Huynh’s last name.
In our February 4 CD review of Go Home, we mistakenly listed
the album as released by Cryptogramophone. The album was
self-released.
In our January 28 story about the Oakland Unified School District’s
failure to provide heat for many of its students (“Too School for
School”), we misquoted International School Principal Carmelita Reyes.
She said “we’re all running a school district as leanly as we can”
— not “we’re all running a school district as lamely as we
can.”
And in our January 28 article about the Best Sex Writing 2009
(“Return of the Lusty Lady”), we misquoted anthology editor Rachel
Kramer Bussell. She said it’s now acceptable for women to attend
“Chippendale”-style strip clubs, not “Chip and Dale”-style strip
clubs.
Q-Tips will be issued to our reporting staff at the next weekly
editorial meeting.
