American car companies try to shift gears, quickly

It’s amazing how some things can stay the same for so long that you’re sure they’ll never change until, rather suddenly, they do. One good example of that is the current radical shift we’re seeing in the car-buying habits of the average American.

It seems we’ve all given lip service to worrying about fuel economy when we’re shopping for cars since at least the Carter administration. But in reality it has never been a primary motivator for most of us.

Certainly there have always been spendthrifts among us (and I admit that I’m one of them) who have looked very hard at the MPG rating for every car they’ve ever thought about buying. But it seems that until very recently most Americans wanted their cars to ride high, have lots of room inside, and respond quickly when they punched the accelerator. And if getting all that meant visiting their friendly neighborhood filling station several times a week they were willing to make that sacrifice.

But it’s different now. Gas prices have gone up so high so quickly that a solid majority of Americans seem to have been suddenly shocked out of their gas-guzzling stupor. People are suddenly very serious about trading in their oversized SUVs for smaller cars that will carry them a lot further between fill-ups. Circumstances have forced us all to become gas-hawks.

Maybe the biggest victims of our sudden change of heart are American car manufacturers. After many years of making good money selling us those big, gas-guzzling monstrosities we love so much they have been caught flat-footed by the dramatic change in buyer preferences. Many jobs are going to be lost as a consequence of what is happening and the very survival of the big three American car companies is now in doubt.

That is not to say that they aren’t trying to change. GM in particular has generated some buzz in the industry with an “almost” fully electric car called the Volt that they are planning to bring to the market in 2010. Not long ago the Volt was just a concept car that GM trotted out during auto shows to show how serious they were about developing the “car of the future.” But now they realize that they may not have a future if they don’t get something on the market that can compete with Toyota and Honda in the fuel efficiency department, so the Volt has been fast-tracked.

GM says the Volt will be able to travel up to 40 miles on battery power alone, and beyond that it will sip a little gas to recharge its batteries and get you down the road another 600 miles or so before needing a recharge. That means it will beat the pants off the hybrids that are on the road right now, and you will be able to recharge the battery by plugging it into a regular wall socket in your garage.

The catch? Well, the key to the Volt’s superior performance is its fancy lithium-ion battery, and those things don’t come cheap. The expected price of the little hatchback has been estimated to be anywhere from $30K to $40K, or perhaps even more. No one really knows what the target price will be at this point, but it is highly likely it’ll be a lot more expensive than other cars that are similarly sized and appointed.

Perhaps by that time gas will be so expensive that we’ll be willing to make the investment in a car that stretches a tank of gas so far. At the very least, give GM some credit for trying to stay relevant.

Let’s hope that it’s not too little, too late. I’d hate to see another big American industry go the way of the dodo.

No easy way to die

This week was a bad one for many convicted murderers in the United States. On Monday our Supreme Court denied the appeals of three death row inmates who were trying to argue that execution by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling ended a months-long moratorium on executions being observed around the country as states waited to see if the prevalent method of execution would pass constitutional muster with the Court. It did, by a convincing 7-2 margin, so presumably death row should be getting a little less crowded in the near future.

Probably a big factor in the decision was the fact that the method of lethal injection at issue has been devised with the goal of ensuring the quickest and most painless death possible. The three-drug cocktail administered during the procedure is supposed to 1) send the subject into a deep, deep state of unconsciousness, 2) completely paralyze the body, including the lungs, and 3) stop the heart. Although there is certainly no pleasant way to die (or kill), it seems the lethal injection method might be about as peaceful a demise as one could hope for.

But not everyone agrees. Critics point out that if the first drug is administered incorrectly the second drug could subject the prisoner to a “waking paralysis”, and the third drug, which stops the heart, is likely to be very painful to a conscious subject. The possibility does not seem so farfetched when you consider that the individuals administering the drugs are generally not medical professionals. (Few doctors are willing to violate their Hippocratic Oath, even in the interest of law and order.)

Perhaps it is an encouraging sign that we care enough about even the most wretched members of our society to at least have a debate about how to carry out their sentences in the least painful way we can devise. History shows us that most societies that have practiced capital punishment have not gone out of their way to make the convicted criminal comfortable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For the most part, the more colorful ways of executing people (burning at the stake, crucifixion, etc.) have largely fallen out of style, and even the more repressive governments in modern times tend to favor more “humane” forms of execution, relatively speaking.

Here in the US we have gradually cycled through a number of methods over the years, each intended to be more civilized than the last. From hanging, to firing squads, to gas chambers, to electric chairs, to the current three-drug “cocktail”, we have tried to make capital punishment as quick and painless (for both the criminal and the observers) as possible.

But we may not be done with the fine-tuning just yet. Another suggested method that has been circulating for almost a decade is called nitrogen asphyxiation, wherein the subject is terminated as a result of breathing pure nitrogen. Nitrogen is an odorless, colorless gas that makes up 78% of the air we breathe. As such, a person who was breathing pure nitrogen would sense nothing unusual or suffer in any way, but would eventually lose consciousness and expire because his body was being deprived of oxygen.

In theory, at least, the individual would not experience any unpleasant sensations during the procedure, i.e. no feeling of suffocation or physical pain. The other big advantage would be that it would require no medical skill to administer the “lethal dose” of nitrogen – someone would simply have to put the breathing mask on the prisoner’s face and let him breathe from a tank of pure nitrogen.

I am sure that eventually we will come up with even more advanced ways of ending human life, such as instantly vaporizing individuals so that there is no pain, no awareness, not even a body to haul away afterwards. I suppose that technology marches on, in all areas. Whether or not that is ultimately a good thing is another question, for another time.