History of cars II

Cars will always be more popular than bicycles or public transport as long as our society values its freedom to travel far and fast and wherever one pleases. Car manufacturers are only relatively recently exploring more environmentally acceptable alternatives to the gasoline engine, but in my opinion, the whole industry needs a dramatic shift in thought.

The car is a terrible example of engineering, if engineering is considered to be the art of coming up with practical solutions to a problem. Imagine, if you were an engineer, receiving your project: "Find a way to transport a person from one place to another. The person must be able to choose his or her own route and speed, and may travel long distances." You would have to examine the numbers involved. An adult could weigh anything from about 40 kg to 120 kg. Basically you must move that. Now imagine you came up with a solution and presented it to your boss: You propose to move an 80 kg person (on average) with a vehicle weighing more than ten times the load it is meant to move. Wouldn't your boss tell you to go back to your office and try again? The solution is hopelessly inefficient. The amount of fuel you would spend moving the actually vehicle would far outweigh the fuel that goes toward moving the person!

Viewed from this perspective, the car looks like a perfect example of an engineering failure, when in fact it is generally seen as one of the greatest single inventions of the past hundred or so years. Why? The speed at which cars can now travel far exceeds the speed limits most governments insist on, because speeding kills, or at least maims and injures (and costs a lot of money). Therefore, from an objective viewpoint, there is no reason to buy a car that can reach such fantastic speeds, because one is simply not allowed to drive that fast. Those cars that can drive so very fast also have the largest, most powerful engines, and that only translates to greater fuel consumption. Why buy them?

Then there are the great monsters of the late 20th century: the SUV, or the 4WD, as it is known in some parts of the world. This seems to have taken over from the luxury sedan as the current statement of wealth, and I do not quite understand why. Some say SUVs are safer, but this is true only if the rest of the people on the road are driving these huge vehicles. The number of people who actually need to use the four-wheel drive facility in these cars is quite small. In snowy areas, it certainly helps to have four-wheel drive, but most luxury sedans are equipped with four-wheel drive for use in snow and rain, and the Subaru has it built into their smaller cars also. As for driving off-track, there are a small number of professionals who do need the SUV, such as geologists and biologists who travel to places inaccessible to ordinary cars. For the rest of us, we should realise that driving off track spreads disease among wildlife and forests, that it degrades soil and encourages erosion, especially in beach areas, and that while we may like enjoying nature at its wildest, our methods of access may well destroy the very landscape we love.

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