In 2002 I contemplated the future of the car and it is interesting to go back and rethink an article. So much has changed in five years. China has become car obsessed and fortunes have been made in supplying to that market. In the West the growing concern for climate change is propelling a huge anti-car movement and especially anti-suv and 4WD. America still consumes more oil than the rest of the whole world put together with crazy overpowered vehicles that on average get less to the gallon than twenty years ago - all this despite the fact that they have to import most of their oil from the middle-east. A region they have monumentally destabilised with the endless war in Iraq.

Green politics are big right now and politicians are scrambling to climb aboard and frighten us all with legislation against the car. Cities are squeezing the car out, punishing drivers for owning one, parking one, or using bus lanes, even in the middle of the night. Speed cops are the worlds largest growth industry to create revenue for local politicians and in the West, at least, motorists are being criminalised by the thousands daily. In the UK there are now 7000 fixed speed cameras and 5000 hand held. The state has declared war on drivers. But drivers vote and elections are due soon. What will be the breaking point?
So thinking about the future of the car is still very relevant.

---

CARBONARRRA- IS THERE A FUTURE FOR THE CAR • Sam North The key to public transport in cities is reliabity, price, accessibity and safety. A city that does not reinvest in a constant cycle in people-moving will die

Is there a sustainable future for the car? The future of the environment is so closely allied to transportation issues, and in particular the motor vehicle, one cannot be considered without the other. The truth is, however, that the car has come to define our environment, what is and what isn’t accessible, what can be dug and removed to make way for the car and what parts of our cities and towns can be set aside for parking of cars.

Nevertheless, the car stands for personal freedom. The rich value it because it is their privacy they prize. The very poor simply aspire to own cars because it is a symbol of success. This is a dream shared by billions all across the planet. For many, the car is a necessity. Rural areas in the West as much as other more remote communities in places such as Northern Scandinavia or South-West Africa cannot depend upon public transport. It is unreliable, inefficient, not really tailored to their lives or scattered populations. Australia, South Africa, the Southern United States and huge areas of the globe where many people inhabit, people live there because the car makes it possible to do so. To demand that people should leave these places and gather in suburban or urban concentrations to make it ‘more convenient’ to serve them with public transportation, foolishness. I am not sure is actually a 'green' solution to build massive vertical cities but already the firswt school in a skyscraper has been announced for London in 2007 and it's a trend that will grow.

The bus and train is a perfect city solution. Certainly it can bring and take people to suburban concentrations with ease and economic scale that the car cannot possibly reach. But it can’t deliver masses to their doors unless they live on top of it. The London Underground or New York Subway is a good illustration. Convenient, traffic free (but not congestion free).

Street Cars making a comeback?

City planners have targeted the car as public enemy number one in cities, with some justification. Overcrowding, the polluted air, the degraded people spaces, parking issues, noise and safety. They have done little in the way of providing safe and protected parking outside the cities however and this is one of the great failures of the last century. Park and Ride had a future, but now it is an expensive option. Land is scarce and safety costs money. London by charging £8 pounds to enter it hopes to keep the car out. It has reduced car traffic but now London is choked with buses and air quality is in fact worse. Has it kept shoppers away from Knightsbridge, Oxford and Bond Street? A small percentage yes, but not really significant. And there is the rub. If you do not live in London, you will either chose to pay this ‘fine’ or use public transport. Right now, public transport in London is hazardous, slow, prone to failure, terrorist attack and sometimes dangerous and often cancelled. No matter what they promise to invest in London, it may never actually be as good as it was twenty years ago. Meanwhile your car is yours to command. It might well be a price worth paying. (if you can afford £4 an hour for parking)

Is the car sustainable in our future? The question should be which future, which car? In the city, electric short journey vehicles (SJVs) must come to the fore to supplement bus and train journeys. The future of cars depend upon the choice of engines as we become much more aware the damage they have done and are doing to our health and our cities. These cars will be hybrid vehicles such as those developed by Toyota. The Prius has already sold more than 550,000 units worldwide and the hybrid Camry already outsells the Prius in Canada.

The ethanol powered Obvio 828 from Brazil

Toyota led the way and now there are 20 hybrid cars available in 2007. Nissan Altima, Lexus RX400hSUV, Ford Escape Hybrid SUV,Honda Civic and Accord both available as hybrids. Clearly aware consumers are making a choice but it is an expensive choice. In the UK the Prius retails at $40,000 dollars. (2007 price)

What are hybrids?
Duel fuel cars - part electric, part petrol or hydrogen or liquid gas. These do have higher production costs, but environmentally and with the support of legislation and tax breaks, it may make sense to sell and for people to buy these cars. Quiet clean electric in town, carbon fuel intensive for long journeys between cities at high speeds. (In the countryside such vehicles may be seen as unnecessarily exotic and expensive.) Prius sales have been impressive but service costs are high and there has been a mass recall in the USA.
Proton exchange membrane engines using chemically active platinum catalysts are proposed by companies such as International Fuel Cells and Vancouver based Ballard Power Systems. So far the problem has been storing highly combustible elements. But since one of the proposed fuels is hydrogen, the emissions will be water vapour, it has to be one of the eventual front runners. In Ford’s own company literature ‘I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100 year reign of the internal combustion engine’. But then again there is a new electric motor about to be announced in Seattle in May 2007 that might change all that...more on that very soon!

There is talk that hybrid cars will generate surplus power for sale back to the local grids or local buildings. ‘95% of power capacity in the USA resides in automobiles with only 2% in electric power plants’ according to Electric Power Research Institute’s Brent Barker. There is a danger that the hybrid engine concept will be oversold similarly to nuclear electric power in the 1950s that would be ‘too cheap to meter’.

The car as a means of civilised transportation and self-esteem will continue to dominate and there will be continued demand for petrol or diesel to feed it. In places like China or India however the car is an overwhelming aspirational item for millions of people and there is a huge unsatisfied demand. There is an extensive bus and train infrastructure for all, but just as rising living standards in the West changed people perceptions of what constitutes ‘success’, public transportation is associated with poverty. Before 2001 there were no private car sales in China. In 2006 3.8 million units were sold alone, including trucks, it is 7.2 million (dowjones figures April 28th). Road building continues apace and with the concept of private property no enshined in law in China, the country is been transformed literally before our eyes and with it comes all the problems that Europe and America have had for nearly a century. Death on the roads are soaring, pollution, traffic choked cities and health related problems. And it is just starting. The car might eat China. We shall see.

A train journey in India covering many miles between cities might cost only a dollar, but it will be full to the brim and rarely maintained to a western standard. The car then, with privacy, faster journey times and able to go exactly where you want to go is clearly going to be seen as a necessity and be a catalyst for personal ambition for millions of Asians for years to come. As standards rise, people want freedom from overcrowded buses and trains, they want their own ‘space’. A car, increasingly a Japanese or European car. The car is not just means of transport; it is a symbol of prosperity and ambition. The evidence of such a shift is happening at a terrifying speed in Shanghai. In the last ten years, they have essentially built a new city that would normally take fifty years elsewhere. Now everyone wants a car and associates the lack of one with ‘backwardness’.

In more mature economies the car is seen to be a ‘problem’ and investment in rail intercity connections is made. To France’s credit they have invested in their fast TGV trains . But it has been at a huge cost in terms of capital, time and taxation. Simultaneously, in British Columbia, Canada, with huge distances to cover they have allowed the passengers trains to wither on the vine and in October 2002 discontinued local passenger trains altogther, leaving the car and SUVs king. (However they are expanding the Skytrain commuter system taking in the airport as pressures to serve the 2010 Winter Olympics grows).

Obviously - in the West, we have lived with the consequences of mass car ownership since the end of WW2. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to wean people off their cars. Most would not quibble that a fossil fuel economy cannot go on forever. But it remains a fact that there is as much oil in the ground as was ever consumed. In theory, the car and petrol can go on. However, as China takes up car ownership on the level of the West, then the global demand for oil would rise extremely sharply, as will the price and competition to secure supplies. The country with duel fuel cars will have an advantage. Equally, other car-choked countries like Thailand already have huge smog problems, which clearly cannot continue.

Fossil fuels do have a negative side. In the UK in the last 25 years 100,000 people have died in automobile related accidents. There are probably more cars than people. The UK is utterly dominated by roads and highways. The air quality in cities has deteriorated (though none are as lethal as when every home burned a coal fire). The car emits carbon gasses that lay trapped in our upper atmosphere. There are studies that show that the carbon levels now are as high as 55 million years ago (from ice core samples taken from Russia and Siberia). The consequences of this could be a rising of world temperatures and the drying and burning of the world’s forests, as well as rising sea levels. This is what the ‘Kyoto Agreement’ is all about. The Inconvenient Truth as Al Gore remarks. This April ws the hottest in the UK for 348 years.

To blithely argue that the car is wrong, that it will in effect seal our fate and destroy the planet is to be defeatist. The car will not go away. There is no model that shows that people will forsake them for buses or trains. There is probably no economic model that could provide efficient solutions for the countryside.

The car is sustainable as a concept, a desire, a necessity. The debate is only about the fuel needed to move them. That might be hydrogen, it might be duel fuel engines, it may yet be electric. At the end of the day, someone will have had to develop that fuel and deliver it to the point of sale. We will have to pay for that fuel. I am not sure there is a model for what exact price it will be that we will not pay to surrender our freedom, but I suspect it is a very high price indeed.

For the car to survive, it is simply necessary to prove that a new generation of fuel is clean, the engines reliable, that refuelling is simple and safe. This will be our future.

© Sam North 2007
May 1st - Todays oil price is $68 per barrel

Sam North is the author of Another Place to Die and other titles. He is the editor of Hackwriters.com

Another Place To Die by Sam North ISBN: 978-1-84753-899-4 The Great Flu Pandemic of 2009 is coming. Are you prepared? Reviews: 'It will keep readers in suspense, laced with gritty-gallows humor' Charlie Dickinson 'Beautiful, plausible, and sickeningly addictive, Another Place to Die will terrify you, thrill you, and make you petrified of anyone who comes near you...'. Roxy Williams - Amazon.co.uk Read the first chapter on line Order Now direct from Publisher : Another Place To Die

The Curse of the Nibelung - A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Sam North ISBN 1-4116-3748-8 $19.98 Retail - 300 pages - Lulu Press USA 'Chocolate will never be the same again' - Sunday Express Buy from your favourite on-line retailer Amazon UK Amazon USA Barnes and Noble & Waterstones Or buy direct from Lulu Press plus delivery charges

More Futures

< Back to Index