From The Wilderness

THE DEATH OF THE FUTURE

By James Strauss

In one of the first ‘From the Wilderness’ articles written more than a year ago, I made a prediction that the forces opposed to both electric vehicles and automatic driving would face nearly overwhelming opposition. The full weight of the amalgamated and co-joined forces of that movement is becoming fully apparent. The mass media, including the New York Times, the Economist, and all prime-time television channels are now starting to advertise the fact that interest in electric cars is waning and sales are going down. Automatic-driving delivery vehicles have just been shut down in Washington and California. A recent accident is indicated as the cause; wherein a pedestrian was hit in the street by a regularly driven vehicle and the body of the person bounced across the road and fell under the wheels of a passing automatically driven automobile. The accident’s cause was given as a failure of the auto vehicle’s system. The attorneys are coming in (sixty percent of all attorney income nationwide is from liability claims, mostly auto), and the police agencies are coming in (eighty percent of all police human contact is through automobiles), auto dealerships are coming in (ninety percent of all profit for car dealers is from service, not sales). Top all that off with the drive by fossil fuel supporters (read; oil companies and states) to get rid of electric vehicles.

The forces gathering to get rid of a clean and safer future are becoming fully visible and arrayed, while the lies endemic to their deepest foundations are not being revealed at all. They are being buried

Driving in human-controlled vehicles is unsafe at any speed, and everyone knows it. Everyone riding in a human-driven vehicle has always got to be paying attention because that passenger knows that life itself is in the hands of a flawed human, or an ‘adjusted’ human if drinking and drugs are to be considered. Electric vehicles get ten times better comparative mileage than gas or diesel-powered ones. These figures are widely available everywhere.

So, what’s happening?

The adjustment of perspective and outright lying is happening and it’s happening at an ever-increasing pace in the only areas the overall public can be informed. It’s happening in newspapers, on television, and on the Internet…and these ‘happenings’ are being fully funded by the opposition powers already mentioned. Automatic driving is a hundred or thousand times safer than human driving and electric cars and trucks are ten times, or more, cheaper to operate in energy consumption as well as servicing. Those staggering differential figures are being totally washed out and kept from public view. Instead, single incidents that might illustrate the opposite of what I’m writing about are being used to, once again, kill off any chance of civilization’s advancement into the future.