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I hope you have all read Joseph McKinney’s opinion piece 
http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/sevendays/12683689-35/story.csp   that has been printed in the Eugene-Register Guard, The Oregonian, and a bunch of other blogs or magazine/newpaper settings this week. Its is quite a dressing down of our Governor Kulongowski, who is making far less than wise choices in how and WHERE we invest in EV production and infrastructure at this time. We hope he hears us. If you agree with us – or not, let us know!  Some of the responses so far have quite missed the point, or simply articulated the I-got-mine or I’m-gonna-get-or-keep-mine mentality that ignores even the need for change, much less the desire.  Some have been great and quite thought provoking.  Talk to us folks!

By Joseph McKinney

Posted to Web: Monday, Apr 27, 2009 05:46PM
Appeared in print: Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009, page A9
Opinion: Editorials & Letters: Story

I’ve been reading about Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s efforts to attract federal stimulus funds so that Oregon can take leadership in the rollout of electric cars and trucks. I applaud the effort, because I believe our future transporters will be electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are the clean alternative to the wasteful, inefficient and dangerously overbuilt models we employ today for the simple task of moving from here to there.

I note that the governor has been working on this project for years. I have been monitoring the subject during the 25 years I’ve spent in the car business as a dealer and as the president of a vehicle leasing and finance company. My company, Oregon Roads Inc., had an electric vehicle division and a partnership with Portland’s Clean Cities program as early as 1994.

Although I’m happy that Kulongoski is focusing attention on electric vehicles, I think he may be doing more harm than good. The governor seems to be acting independently. Why not network with the Oregonians who have experience in the field? There are at least three manufacturers in Oregon designing electric vehicle prototypes, but Kulongoski spends his time promoting products from other countries.

Automotive manufacturers are on the ropes. More than half of them have suffered heretofore unfathomable losses. The CEO of Fiat Group, Sergio Marchionne, recently suggested that only six of 27 companies will survive. Looking to this sector for solutions is a dead end.

The governor recently met with representatives from Th!nk, an electric vehicle maker from Norway that was spun off from Ford a few years ago. The company is broke, but Kulongoski showed them the Freightliner facility in Portland. Soon they will offer to use it, but they’ll expect us to pay for it.

If the governor had been networked with other Oregonians in the field, he would have known that we were working with Th!nk to license the company’s technology and build a variation of its design in the Lane County motor home consortium. We have available skilled labor, surplus facilities and years of experience.

So what is better for Oregon? When Kulongoski offers incentives to Th!nk, the company can bail out Daimler, Freightliner’s owner, by assuming the liabilities and paying the rent on its Portland factory. The benefit goes to German and Norwegian corporations. Perhaps Oregon corporations would have been the beneficiary as well as Oregon lenders, suppliers, manufacturers and ultimately the consumer had Kulongoski not been involved.

The same interference in our marketplace is leading the state down another road to folly. There are two competing conglomerates trying to get governments to invest in charging stations for electric vehicles. Neither of these companies has any connection to Oregon. They are supported by Nissan and Mitsubishi, which are developing electric vehicles also without any connection to Oregon. They have the support of Tesla, a California company converting a British Lotus to sell as a $120,000 electric car.

How many Oregonians will be buying those cars? Why does the governor suggest spending $30 million of Oregonians’ taxes to build a charging infrastructure we will never fully use?

We are making a transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles, but the highway is the last place you’ll find them. During the next decade we will see electric vehicles replacing cars powered by internal combusion engines in our villages. Electric vehicles make great village vehicles, and 80 percent of our driving is in that realm. My commute to work, taking my daughter to school and doing my grocery shopping can all be accomplished by an efficient, lightweight, 30 mph electric vehicle. The highways are the least appropriate place for electric vehicles, and therefore the least appropriate place for charging stations.

We need electric village vehicles to connect us to mass transit. Highway travel will be replaced by high speed rail in the future, not highway-speed electric vehicles. If Kulongoski can provide incentives for electric vehicles with a contribution of $30 million, he should consider using those resources instead as seed money and participate with other Oregonians in a coordinated effort to develop electric vehicle solutions for Oregonians and by Oregonians.

Joseph McKinney of Eugene is president of Oregon Roads Inc.

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What is interesting about Joseph was captured by Diane Dietz in her article “Clean-burning Cars Ignite Fight Within Dealers’ Ranks” a few years ago in our local paper, The Eugene-Register Guard. (oregonroads)

It has been fascinating to work with a truly ethical car dealer and one who is such a long time advocate for green, sustainable change in his industry.  I tell everyone in town:  don’t buy your cars anywhere else.  Although the primary business of ORI is auto fleet leasing, they do sell individual cars.  And they will, if you allow them, talk you into the most green, most economical car for you, rather than the most expensive.  They won’t play games with you.  That is what got me, ever the curious nudge, into this fifteen year old conversation with Joseph that has developed into a book.  (To me, the real name of our book is: The End of the Road; the Fierce Urgency of Infrastructure.)  OK, that was time out for a little free advertising for ORI, but Joseph McKinney and his crew absolutely deserve it.  ORI ought to be carrot mobbed.

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(We want to start by giving you some of the substance of the book; we will likely go back after this and post the Intro.)

CHAPTER ONE (Joseph McKinney in normal type; Amy Isler Gibson commentary in italics):

I’m Joseph and I’m a car dealer. I feel like I’m introducing myself at an addiction support group. President G. W. Bush’s recent admission that we’re a nation addicted to oil was not the first time I noticed. I’ve been in the business for 25 years. I’ve been on the planet 52 years. Nothing in my business is new.

I was born in 1956. That’s right about the time that the Interstate Highway system and the suburban migration changed the American landscape. Each family was capable of owning its own personal transportation device, a car.

People were moving around fine without cars. I was born in New York. Mobility takes many forms there. People take busses to trains to subways and perhaps a taxi. Ferries still carry cars and people but just imagine how many people used to use ferries to and from Manhattan Island. There weren’t very many bridges to Manhattan until planners were convinced that they’d be full of cars.

I live in the Pacific Northwest now and enjoy my visits to Seattle, perhaps because it reminds me a bit of home. I love the Puget Sound. I had considered moving to Seattle when I moved west but the traffic congestion also reminded me of home and one of the primary reasons I was leaving in the first place. I was spending too much time in the car and I think that’s low quality time.

Americans have romantic notions of cars. Even though they drive on ugly roads, by ugly mills and factories, billboards and strip malls, they try to imagine the glory of the open road. We are great at pretending. Any moment now I’ll see a beautiful landscape, roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair. Snow covered peaks and Sonoma dessert sunsets are captured on TV and I’m sure I’ll see one around the next bend. Our expectations are not created by life. They are created mostly by television.

It’s sad but true that most of the wonders Americans feast their eyes on are seen from the car. We don’t hike those peaks and we don’t camp in the dessert and we don’t fish those rivers. We satisfy ourselves with a drive through Vermont in the fall.

But is it materially better to view those leaves from behind a windshield than sitting before a TV screen? Are people meant to view beauty or experience it? Do we spend so much time working to afford mobility and modern convenience that we’ve no time left to savor an experience.  Must we substitute a snapshot of it?

Is a vehicle a means to an end, in this case literally meaning to get us from here to there? Other things can move us and that’s both literal and figurative. A vehicle is a tremendous metaphor.

This is America. Here we proudly claim we’ll fight and die for freedom. We find mobility and freedom synonymous. This attachment extends wholeheartedly to our cars, our right to buy what we want and drive what we want.  Its changing; people are seeing the wisdom of more fuel efficient cars, but that psychology is absolutely tied to the price of gas, artificially low right now and within a few years absolutely going to turn around and sock us. Peak oil is here, and few understand that gas prices are artificially low currently, and for only a brief moment.  Still, the car culture is cult-like. Speak out against cars and you’ve got enemies from big oil to the Big 3, not to mention the truckers, classic car buffs, motor heads and bikers. They’re everywhere. Now I think we could include Tahoe driving soccer moms too.  We just can’t seem to imagine any other way of doing our daily business.

Okay Joseph, Amy here.  Lets begin right here, where I feel you are talking to people like me.  I am a parent and I work, right now from home.  I drive a lot.  But I don’t love my car, and I doubt many women in my situation would say that they do either.  Maybe men are different in this; I suspect not, I suspect how one feels about driving is more situational.

Driving exhausts me. I can remember the thrill of learning to drive, but doing so every day, especially the multiple, repetitive trips to get my children, take them to events, drop one off and pick up the next, all the while driving right back up the hill I live on about 15 minutes from the heart of the city, well I hate it.  Not only is it boring and mindless, except of course for safety, in my (youthfully cool but still) middle age it is uncomfortable as well as guilt-producing, because I know that with these multiple trips I am wasting gas.

But I put up with it like everyone else does, because I do not see what my choices are.  You make it sound as though we all have luxury vehicles that we adore driving as much as possible.  My car is a work horse, and any luxuries it has, such as heated seats, I feel entitled to due to my various aches and pains – which most of us have by now (I am 51.)  We live in a city that has a flat downtown but a hilly surrounding suburban residential area on almost all sides.  I live in the hilly part with my famiy.  My knees prevent me from biking. We tried a bike rack. I can’t lift bikes so I need to work out more and get stronger, and need yet another ride into town for that, and physical therapy, etc.  The bus service comes only remotely near where I live two times during the day: 7:45 a.m., and 3:45 pm.  There is simply no way right now I could get by on those times.

We live in a frenzied, competitive time, and the current recession has only made us all desperate.  We make trade-offs.  Driving is the cost, for me, of having work that allows me to put my children first, and being at home means I am not close to the places I need to shop during the week. Of course I try to conserve trips; I bet most of us do.  We are tired, and we really do not want the expense or the moral guilt from using gas.

I tried a hybrid; I really wanted to do the right thing.  It was an uncomfortable car, and it did not get the mileage it claimed it would.  I feel terrible driving a regular, internal combustion car, and terrified about the major family event that comes in a few short months, when my son turns 16 and we hand him the keys to the car, with no more Dad or Mom beside him watching the road.

I don’t want your ideas to be unpopular Joseph.  I have learned a great deal from you, and am convinced by your concerns.  But you do seem to make it sound like the way out is easy, even quick.  I dare to hope again, even after the painful lessons brought home by such urgently imploring illustrations in, for example, An Inconvenient Truth.  I believe the future does depend upon each one of us making the right choices, and that we are out of time to simply leave the solutions to our children.  We already lost that battle; I was learning about pollution in grade school and was taught it had to be handled by us when we grew up.  Well, we know how that assignment ended.  Help me here, how do I have faith in our project?

I imagine I could be the most unpopular man in America to suggest that it’s the end of the road!  But that is what I am here to say.

That’s right. It’s all downhill from here. We are past due when it comes to changing our models of mobility. We’ve fouled the air and water with our inappropriate, destructive methods of movement. We must change now because the rest of the world is about to follow that model and that would be suicide.

I put my 177 pounds into a 4000 pound vehicle to move me efficiently from here to there. Inappropriate and unnecessary.

It’s got the horsepower of 300 horses, but most of the time I could make the trip on one horse. Inappropriate and unnecessary? Overkill.  Folly.

It’s got the technology to protect me from a hundred different threats from numerous directions. Of course, I could kill and maim so many others with it. I don’t mean car bombing. I mean hitting pedestrians or a school bus. But I’m not alone. Not only is my personal safety covered, much of the transportation infrastructure and regulatory policy is designed to efficiently carry my weapon (car) safely and efficiently.

I have an incredible amount of comfort within my weapon. I’ve Beethoven or The Beatles filling the air in crystal clarity. I’ve heated leather seats, automatic climate control, automatic cruise control, automatic lighting and even my windshield wipers are automatic.

I’m not sure which came first but it’s clear that our vehicles are our living rooms today.  Forget the living room Joseph! What I am cut off of so much of the day is my own office, and that is a problem for many people.

People are working, moms and dads, all the time to pay for their vehicles that cost on average 10% of family income. If one works all the time, there’s no time for oneself. So now our phone is in the car, our kids watch movies in the car, our many beverages have a place of their own and our meals are consumed while we race from here to there.

I absolutely telephone, write checks, drink hot chocolate (to my corporeal self, coffee is a serious, awful drug, but that’s just me) and even eat my lunch on the run.  I know these things are wrong, but I do not do them out of carelessness or callousness.   I do them because as a working mother who wants to be there at 3:15 for her children, everything I do, from work to volunteering to exercise to dr. appointments and shopping is fit into so few hours.  Why not wait for the weekends?  Sports and more sports, with my children. How did this insane lifestyle evolve?!

Nor do I work just for fun, though I love working and would go insane without it.  I work because we have three children to put through college (and because of course our college savings and our 401K are in smithereens); I work because I love what I do, and I work because I am driven to make a contribution and give back what my education and privileges have allowed me to become.  This is not a mere matter of convenience.  To me it often feels like survival!   And of course, responsibility.

Our love of cars and convenience has created the convenience store phenomenon. That’s what we call those stores that have terrible selections of the unhealthiest products at incredibly high prices. Doesn’t this sound like addictive behavior to you yet?

Oh yes, that it does.  Not to particularly pick on convenience stores, but I have so many times wondered:  what would Lewis and Clark make of their beloved West, filled as it is with tacky convenience and big box stores.  The health and beauty that could have been, in this country, if our primary values were not: more and easy.)  Yet I still balk at the idea of “love of cars” and “love of convenience.”  I think you are taking things out of context, turning systemic cultural demands into the simple preferences of the individual.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter because the outcome is still the same: our ridiculous driving behaviors.  People rarely start out intending to get addicted to anything…

We will get back to the idea of addiction; there is more in it than our Prior Occupant’s philosophy could imagine… Oh yes, I was talking about folly. I was talking about the end of the road.

I imagine that we’re all conservative on some levels. We conserve our air and water, put nuts away like squirrels and know that inappropriate, destructive behavior is unsustainable. The way we’ve evolved our transportation systems and networks has been anarchic. We could not see today’s vehicles when we designed roads years ago. We didn’t have the best transportation planners, engineers and designers working on the project. It’s been a haphazard development, and some might claim that to be the reason things are so good.

But the result is a system of roads and expenses that support them that I believe to be at the end of its useful life. Roads can be decommissioned, utilized during a period of transition and saved as a neighborhood museum. Industries can re-tool. Priorities can be re-set.

Some people will be sad and some angry at the end of the road. Sadness comes, perhaps, from nostalgia, from the hearts of the romantics still wedded to their cars and roads. Anger comes from those who perceive that someone is taking away their weapon, or freedom, or comfort or power.

Some people are always looking down. They are proponents of the myth of scarcity. There’s not enough. It’s ending too soon. How will we deal with our shrinking pot of finite resources?

Other people are looking up, consider there to be an infinite quantity of options, solutions, ideas and alternatives. That’s the optimism I remember from school as the essence of being American. We don’t look down and say, “Too bad, there’s not enough oil. When oil burns it’s killing us. Let’s just burn it and fight over it anyway.” I was taught that we’re smarter than that. I was taught we are adaptive and rewarded by our bullishness.

That’s right, just like on Wall Street, there are bulls and bears. On these streets, Main Streets, the mean streets, real streets, we’ve got some serious change coming. Embrace the end of the road, embrace the change and ride it. Know that it’s coming and be a part of the solution. I don’t know about you but after 52 years, I’m ready to do the right thing and stop going along, just another part of the problem.

I want to embrace this idea; I will embrace it.  But it is overwhelming, this solution we are offering.   I would be lying to say I am without fear and doubt.  The change we are talking about here is so big!  In fact it does not begin and end with cars; we are talking about the whole we way we live our lives, design or improve our cities, and more.  We will come back to that more systemic overview repeatedly in this book.

I would not have signed on to this project with you if I had no optimism in me.  I have indeed seen the difference one person can make, and what a whole group of organized people who are prepared to work and sacrifice for the greater good can accomplish.  Perhaps we are just planting seeds here, which is a good thing, but I want more than that.  Because our planetary and cultural challenges are absolutely dire, I want to see a difference now, before it’s too late. Because I do agree with you, it is the end of the road as we know it.