BMW... Some bitches?!?!?

Oil Derrick
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

So I’m watching some old shows on the DVR last night, and I come across an ad from BMW… it’s of water (well, CG water) forming the outline for an unannounced hydrogen-powered 7 Series… and the tag line is some bullshit like, “when the world is ready, a BMW 7 Series is ready for the world.”

Now here’s the REALLY fucked-up thing about this ad, in particularly this car… back in 1988 when I was in high school, there was a blurb in BusinessWeek (I saved the article for years) in which BMW was doing track testing of a 7 Series that ran on hydrogen… twenty years ago! Fucking two generations and maybe 6 model updates… and we still haven’t seen this car get close to becoming a production car… they’ve obviously worked out the kinks to a hydrogen fueled car (with water as the “waste exhaust”) since then, and they’ve probably road-tested the hell out of this car.

It just tells you how much of a stranglehold the oil companies have on the automotive consumer market… and that GM and Ford probably can’t master the technology, so they can’t enter into collusion talks with ExxonMobil, ConnocoPhillips and the rest of the robber barons who have been making profits the likes the planet has never previously seen (perhaps even conceived).

Oil and its byproducts are one of the few products on the market that buck most economic laws of supply & demand…

But I think that BMW is a bunch of bitches, because they could be leading the way with this technology, they could be partnering with companies like Chevron (which claim to be an “energy” company) or Shell or even new Green companies in rolling out the infrastructure to support autos like this.

Although… who am I kidding thinking that corporations would do anything for the public good – that’s one of the reasons why there are corporations, so people can act like complete assholes in the name of money and decadence and not really be held accountable for such behavior.

I mean, when I was in junior high my history professor was telling the class how his brother worked on a research unit at one of the big three (at the time big four) auto makers and they created a carburetor component add-on that they junky late 70s to early 80s averaging 70 mpg. Once they presented the research study to the board, the researchers were given a pat on the back, asked to sign all sorts of non-disclosure documents (in lieu of HEFTY sums of money) and then lab work was stuffed in box – much like the Box in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Even though I am a conspiracy theorist, because my teacher related this story on a tangent (and I’ve heard about all sorts of other tech breakthroughs that have been silenced and squelched throughout the decades) I’m most inclined to believe it and ever since then I’ve been waiting for Detroit to unveil this decades-old technology.

The Internal Combustion Engine ranks up there near the top as one of the most malignant engineering creations known to man. And the oil companies make a shitload of their profits from just refining oil into gasoline…

People in the country are loosing their ability to stay afloat financially by using credit cards to pay for shit like gas, gas in the cars!!! At like 14+% APR.

There’s a movie I’ve been catching pieces of on cable the last month called MAXED OUT… and it’s about the problems with Debt in America and the scurrilous tactics of the Credit Card Companies and the Banks that hand out subprime loans. It’s all a spiral that takes us all down the shitdrain…