FINALLY.

As our faithful readers all know, Corn Car is concerned that talk of hybrid and alt.-fueled cars can get bogged down in retarded semantics about how impractical, ugly, expensive, and otherwise untenable they are when compared to regular cars. Now, we’ve already shared some ideas about how to appeal to consumers, but what about the auto industry? They’re the ones making the things, after all, and right now they’re stonewalling; they claim economic woes, but they’ve been achingly slow to progress beyond standard engines anyway. How do you reach people who both hate and fear change? Here are some ideas:

1. Require that some of their bailout money be spent on alt. fuels research. Auto manufacturers have been working the treasury like a slot machine for a while now. So have many troubled industries, of course, but they haven’t been as stupidly run as Detroit for the past couple of decades. Instead of just giving the auto industry money to continue making the same poor decisions and short-sighted mistakes it’s been making, which includes stalling on hybrid/electric car development, hang some conditions on those bailouts. They’re no strangers to extortion, so use it against them (in a purely legislative sense of course) to start building better cars that make use of newer technology.

2. Explain that they’ll have to hire people to build these cars. Hybrid vehicles have two motors and a bevy of electronics to power them, and electric cars make use of special batteries, and these will require a sizable investment, both in money and manpower. New people will have to be hired to build these things, in other words, and the employment opportunities created therein would be positive for both the industry’s image and precarious karmic balance. They’ll also need more technicians to design, install, and improve the electronic parts. The nostalgic, Ford plant assembly line imagery of a previous era might be gone for good, but the notion of the auto industry as a steady employer whose presence in the community is a net positive isn’t dead. It just needs an update.

3. Explore the marketing potential. American auto companies are currently lampooned as being outdated, irrelevant, and permanent silver medalists at best behind their Japanese competitors. By seizing new technology and developing it to its fullest potential, automakers can rebrand themselves as cutting-edge innovators with a legitimate hand in bringing the future to consumers. “Hybrid, electric, and flex-fuel cars began with science,” they can say, “but it took our industrial know-how to put them in your driveway.” Pair that with some plaintive acoustic guitar in the background and maybe a couple of happy blond children running through a cornfield and you’ve got yourself an ad. Hey, laugh all you want, it’s no worse than this Ford Edge spot.

4. Explain the bit about hiring new workers again, but with graphs and sock puppets. Auto industry executives, as history has shown, can be alarmingly dense. Thankfully, that’s nothing an informative puppet show can’t solve. Seriously. One of the interns explained the Biot-Savart Law to us over lunch that way. Amazing stuff.

5. Threaten to awaken Dread Cthulhu. We’re not sure what the current diplomatic relationship is between America and R’lyeh, but it’s certainly true that Japan, with Godzilla, Mothra, and Mecha-Godzilla at its disposal, has unleashed unimaginably horrific monstrosities upon itself more than once to spur production and lend additional incentive to its lagging industries. They do it without prior warning, but we, as the leaders of the free world, owe more to our citizenry. Simply letting Detroit know that we can harness the power of Cthulhu should be more than enough to get them back to the ol’ drawing board.

We’ll have more to add at a later date, but feel free to comment with any thoughts you might have. And keep away from Dunwich, just in case we have to resort to #5.

While you’re waiting for that list we promised ages ago (which is coming, we assure you), check out This Is Reality, a website focused around the coal industry and its myriad dishonest marketing/lobbying efforts. The Coen Brothers, of Fargo and Burn After Reading fame, just directed a commercial for TIR, which you can find here. All in all, they’re another bullet in the sustainable fuels chamber and we’re glad to have found them!

We’re still working on that list of ways to convince the auto industry that alt. fuels are the way to go, but in the meantime here are some quick tidbits from the news.

- Pacific Ethanol isn’t quite dead, just mortally wounded. It’s getting better!

- A Saudi Arabian scholar has warned that ethanol might be sinful for Muslims because oil is an important diplomatic link to the United States and perhaps the sole reason that the Saudis’ myriad human rights violations and shady foreign deals keep getting overlooked. No, just kidding, ethanol is bad because there’s alcohol in it.

- San Francisco has introduced electric car charging stations to the city as part of a larger plan to turn the Bay Area into “the ‘Electric Vehicle Capital of the U.S.’” Patton Oswalt is expected to blow a gasket in response any day now.

- Political cartoons still suck.

The year is 1978. The Cold War rages on, artificial insulin has just been invented, the city of Cleveland goes bankrupt under the temperamental eye of then-mayor Dennis Kucinich, and the world sees both the tragic death of Keith Moon and the equally tragic birth of Ashton Kutcher. And, weirdly enough, Jack Nicholson was driving a hydrogen car. Probably while wearing flared pants and a shirt with lapels large enough to threaten commercial aviation, and his bit about the car “revolutionizing suicide” due to the lack of poisonous exhaust fumes was in poor taste, but this is still pretty amazing. Even moreso than those taffy-thick Canadian accents. Yikes.

Returning to 2009, Daniel Sperling appeared on The Daily Show recently to explain the government’s role in advancing fuel-efficient cars. Sperling didn’t have too many nice things to say about corn ethanol, claiming that it doesn’t do much for climate change and that the money would be better spent on electric cars, but the more interesting portion of this interview was his explanation of what has kept electric/hybrid/hydrogen cars from rocketing into the mainstream; the technology is well on its way, but the auto and fuel industries (and consumers of course) need to accept it, and the government is the mediator between those two forces. We hadn’t really thought about it that way, but that does make a lot of sense and, really, that smacks of Obama’s approach to the issue. In our next post, we’ll suggest ways for the government to sweet-talk Big Industry into accepting flex-fuel cars, but feel free to comment if you have ideas of your own.

As the title indicates, there’s good news and bad news on the ethanol front these days.

First the bad: the industry is going broke. There are a lot of leaks in the hull of the SS Ethanol right now, not the least of which are “volatile corn prices wreaking havoc on balance sheets…declining ethanol and gasoline prices…a massive slide in demand… [and] record-tight credit markets.” The full effect has been brutal. Ethanol plants are shutting down left and right as the companies backing them go under when banks don’t renew their loans or grant new ones. Renew Energy is the most recent casualty; they filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

The good news is that the USDA wants to bail the industry out, going as far as releasing $25 million in biomass research funding last week, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that “the USDA has a role, I believe, in helping to develop and promote…practices that will increase and enhance management efficiencies, which in turn will allow more of these producers of ethanol to stay in business.” In English, that means the government will help ethanol manufacturers who know what they’re doing and why.

Also, researchers at the Dept. of Energy’s laboratory in Brookhaven have developed a direct ethanol fuel cell, which they say can “oxidize ethanol and produce clean energy in fuel cell reactions” by “breaking carbon bonds at room temperature and efficiently oxidizing ethanol into carbon dioxide as the main reaction product.” Ethanol is unique in that it produces carbon dioxide instead of acetalhyde and acetic acid, which don’t really do much for generating power.

So if nothing else, the government is willing to pitch in and help develop biofuels, which is pretty amazing when you consider how besotted with oil money our political structure is. Stay tuned to the Corn Car News Desk for further updates.