How 'Green' is Our Technology?

In the past century America has been one of the leading innovators in producing electricity controlled cars. These all have to some extent been considered failures for American automakers, largely in part on the notion that they are too high maintenance for the common driver. They have been failures not just for America, but also for much larger foreign makers, such as, Honda and Toyota. However, those two companies have succeeded more when it comes to the innovation of the Hybrid vehicle.
In 1999 Honda produced the first widely sold Hybrid vehicle, The Insight, to the marketplace. Perhaps feeling threatened by the notion of another ‘roadblock’ in American manufacturing, Ford gets to work on innovating a new brand of hybrid. And in 2004, five years after the production of the first global hybrid car, Ford introduces the Ford Escape Hybrid . This was also the first Hybrid SUV that was put into production by any American automaker, which only furthers the notion that America is concerned more with the size of vehicles (i.e. any Ford model, and GM as the big distributor of SUV’s) than they are about the quality and usefulness of such a vehicle.
So what took us so long to really get on board this alternative lifestyle of driving? Maybe, a realization came to American car executives that such a drastic change would ultimately be too risky. What if their designs were to fail and lose their companies millions, and if not billions of dollars? They would have to lay off workers or freeze their pay for a while. Not easing our cause is the fact we are currently in a recession and what used to be one of our most nationally profitable industries are now sinking into debt and layoffs. Green technology is the wave of the future, America may have tried the electric car, but now is the time to redefine what it means to get a certain mileage.

Are Americans Too Spoiled?

Are Americans just too spoiled?
How many cupholders does the car have? Does it have a GPS system? Can this car go offroading? These are just some of the questions that may arise when looking into car shopping in today’s society. You may ask yourself, “why don’t those people ask about mileage?, what about the engine?, can this car run on alternative fuels?” I guess the answers to these questions have been proven by you, the shoppers, over the last 50 or so years.
If there is one thing in particular that the rest of the world is doing better than us when it comes to manufacturing cars, it involves dedication. Companies that were founded and still reside in America, like Ford Motors , General Motors , and Chrysler were built on the principle that America is the number one country in the world in producing goods that can be used all over the world as well. Now, America has lost confidence in the quality of their exports making other industrialized countries feel superior and inspire innovation. Come to think of it these cars we make here are not very advanced when it comes to price. Americans are almost paying as much for their own mass produced cars then the ones we get from overseas. So what makes us, as consumers, want to buy those foreign cars instead of the ones we make right here in America? This brings us back to the spoiled quality of Americans.

“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”- Ivan Illich

We as a society don’t have needs we have desires, and the ultimate desire is to “ keep up with the Joneses.” We subconsciously need to be better than other people, or in this case, countries because we have been hit so hard before by depression and recession that we can’t afford to fall behind.

Project Proposal

medium/media: Blog
Topic: The rise of foreign automakers
Audience: middle-class workers, car enthusiast
Sources used/works referred to: likely newspaper articles, personal accounts, news programs etc.
Kinds of Writing used: Informative(historical), humor(more tounge in cheek), opinion, factual info
Brief Description: Ever since the post war era The American car industry has risen and fallen with the economy. The rise of foreign automakers has cost thousands of workers their jobs in the past century. Looking specifically at General Motors and Ford in the past century this blog is meant to inform as well as to leave room for opinion. Why has the auto industry fallen so hard? Are foreign automakers to blame or is it America's growing addiction to perfection(i.e. looks)?