All of those people who became outraged when the late Ralph Nader ruined the equally late Al Gore’s chances for the presidency in 2004 seem to have re-focused their hissy-fits on Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein. Their new martyr/hero, Nicola Tesla, died in 1943 after several years of buttonholing people in bars and demanding that they openly acknowledge him as the father of electricity. It would have been a fitting irony if somebody had become sufficiently fed up with his strident protests to send him to the electric chair.

Now scientist-inventor Tesla is being celebrated with an electric car bearing his name. Another in the long list of battery-powered vehicles designed to save the world from the internal combustion engine, this one will sell for less than a million dollars and will tear your eyebrows off as you hurry to the main electrical generating plant at Niagara Falls. This is sometimes described as automotive progress.

Not to be outdone, General Motors is moving heaven and earth in an attempt to create a lithium-ion battery-powered car called the Volt—which will be a wonderfully appropriate name if it actually works. As of this writing, nobody seems to know whether it will or not. The Volt is monstrously complex, and there is virtually no hope that they will ever be able to sell it at a profit, even if it works perfectly. The initial costs are simply too high. It can achieve forty miles on its battery (the crowd goes wild!) but a small internal combustion engine will allow the delighted owner to toddle along to a gas station, or an electrical outlet, or a Honda dealership, whichever comes first.

Of course, there is an existing affordable alternative. It is called the “hybrid,” and while it cannot displace the burden of its power needs onto our nation’s electrical grid wholesale, it can refill its own batteries as it goes, and it virtually duplicates the driving experience to which we’ve become accustomed over the last hundred years. Detroit might have ruled the world with hybrids by now, but they chose to waste a couple of years arguing that hybrids were a snare and a delusion perpetrated on weak-minded Americans by the crafty (and dishonest) Japanese. GM’s Robert Lutz was the conductor and lead baritone in that chorus, but ironically, he’s now among the format’s biggest champions thanks to the Volt’s e-Flex plug-in system. As of yesterday, imported hybrids like Toyota’s Prius are outselling GM’s various hybrids by about a bazillion-to-one. Only time will tell if the Japanese will beat Lutz to the plug-in punch, too.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has said that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. That goes double for Detroit.

At the other end of the scale we have the Smart ForTwo. This is a tiny little jasper that never met a crosswind it could resist. Nobody loves it but its builder, Daimler-Benz; the man who sells it, Roger Penske; and anybody who ever wanted to live in Biosphere II. It appears that Mr. Penske will sell 14,000 of the little sweeties in the United States this year, which is twice as many as he expected to sell, but probably fewer vehicles than he’ll retail from one of his Toyota dealerships. The Smart is exquisitely dumb for everybody but Mr. Penske, who, when it fails, will demand and receive back-breaking reparations from Mercedes-Benz and the government of Baden Wurttemberg, and the seeds of World War III will be sown.

Through all of the silliness detailed above, people who have proved themselves to be pretty good at building cars continue to do a pretty nice job of providing us automotive consumers with useful, pleasing transportation.

Porsche, along with Audi and Volkswagen, will not be asking for a government bailout any time soon. Jaguar is going to stage a startling comeback in the hands of Mr. Ratan Tata, who is exactly what that great line of cars needed. I had hoped that former Ford chairman Jac Nasser might have landed Jaguar, because I enjoy and admire him, but Ratan Tata has come to save the day for Jaguar. Toyota is one great automated machine, programmed to create happily satisfied customers wherever it goes, and Honda is not far behind.

Despite its long record of incredibly bad decisions—Fiat, Saab, Subaru, Lotus, Hummer, Isuzu, Suzuki—GM has managed to build a growing number of desirable cars with constantly improving quality. The brilliant Ecotec engine (“the new Small Block”) seems on course to power everything but the slide projectors at General Motors. Ironically, their longest running and most successful partnership is with Toyota in Freemont, California. The Pontiac Vibe that comes out of the Freemont plant is worthy of inclusion in anybody’s automobile portfolio. Across Detroit from GM, Ford is cranking out one surprising new product after another.

Chrysler continues to climb back toward the top of the mountain it fell from while in the greedy hands of Jurgen Schremp at Daimler-Benz. Nobody in the industry could have predicted the horrible outcome of the Daimler-Chrysler deal. Nobody can now predict how much longer it will take to heal the last of the wounds left by that ill-conceived and ill-conducted Ponzi scheme.

The Renault-Nissan deal engineered by Mr. Carlos Ghosn hasn’t worked out as hoped, but it may yet bear fruit. The fruit of the Renault-Nissan alliance—the products—is pretty damned good. The Nissan Versa is cute as a bear cub, and it works. Unfortunately the marriage is flawed and the neighbors are concerned.

We live and drive through troubled times. Looking at all the carnage left by bad business deals and bad management, it is important to remember that good times are never as good as they seem, nor are bad time as bad as the charming, attractive talking heads on television tell us they are.

Aesop could have prevented a lot of the bad stuff that I have just described when he said: “Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.”

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 38