The story of America’s built
environment over the past century is one that revolves largely around the
automobile. Cars have ever-increasingly shaped our cities, our homes, and our
foreign policy. We devote forty percent of our urban areas to cars, in the form
of roads and parking lots (in some cities the number is as high as sixty
percent). Our traffic laws theoretically grant pedestrians the right of way--a
pretty laughable concept, since it’s obvious that traffic engineers consider
cars the real priority. And of course our insatiable national thirst for
petroleum, which shapes so much of our foreign policy, is in large part due to
our beloved automobiles.
Thankfully, if current
developments are any indication, we’re finally reaching the beginning of the end
of our auto-obsessed age. That’s not to say that cars are going away soon, if
ever, nor even that they’ll look very different. But internally, they’re going
to be as different from today’s noisy, fume spewing machines as a digital watch
is from Big Ben.
Hybrid cars, which use a small,
relatively efficient internal-combustion engine to generate electricity onboard,
are already making major inroads against traditional gasoline engine-powered
cars. Yet any vehicle that uses an internal-combustion engine--even just part of
the time, as hybrids do--will always be inefficient. That’s why the hybrid is
just a stepping stone to straight electric cars that will run on battery power
alone.
Once cars go 100 percent electric,
the real paradigm shift will begin. An electric-powered vehicle will be smaller
on the outside, because it won’t need a bulky gasoline engine, not to mention a
radiator, mechanical transmission, exhaust system, fuel tank, or differential.
Once battery technology comes up to speed--and rest assured, it will--the
absence of all this clunky hardware will mean that cars will be much lighter as
well. These new vehicles will be the ultimate in simplicity, because power won’t
be transmitted through a friction-laden drive train of pistons, cranks, and
gears, but rather by electrons flowing through a piece of wire.
All this is good news for planet
Earth. But if you were expecting the old guard of the American auto industry to
lead this revolution, you can forget it. Just as the personal computer
revolution was begun, not by corporate behemoths like IBM or Control Data, but
rather by a couple of kids named Jobs and Wozniak, the automobile revolution
will likewise come from some unruly fresh thinkers who are probably still
shooting spitballs in a high school somewhere. Unlike the hundred-ten-year-old
auto industry, they aren’t weighed down by the inertia of a huge historic
investment in internal combustion technology or a lineage inextricably linked
with fossil fuels.
This historic inertia is the
reason once-invincible automakers like General Motors have been so humbled in
the last twenty years--and deservedly so, it must be said. It was their longtime
arrogance, greed, and steadfast opposition to the need for greener
transportation that brought them this comeuppance.
Okay. So electric cars are
inevitable. Not all the news is good, though--next time: a closer look at
electrics, and why they’re “zero emissions vehicles” in name only.
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