White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Private Car Is a Miracle — It Gets Better and Better

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Today’s cars are miraculous, marvelous. They are twice as good as they were just 30 years ago — if you measure them by life expectancy, safety, reliability and comfort.

As William Gouse, an expert at SAE International which coordinates and sets the standards for cars and trucks worldwide, said, it was just decades ago when we expected cars to start giving trouble at 70,000 to 80,000 miles on the odometer. Now we expect twice that and more even from cars, SUVs and light trucks. We also no longer expect flat tires and engines overheating.

Gouse told me in a television interview that not only is quality from an owner’s point of view far better, but safety is equally improved. You are more likely to survive a crash.

The story of the automotive evolution to excellence is a story of incremental improvement; of the technological equivalent of compound interest – a little bit more every year.

It is a story of how better technology and materials, government regulation and competition have entwined to produce a welcome result. Therefore, it is a tale that needs repeating elsewhere.

The technology got better because technology is getting better in everything, particularly the role of computers under the hood. The materials got lighter, stronger and more durable. The government has demanded better cars and trucks year after year: better mileage, better safety, better crash survivability and better emissions controls.

The government role is important because it has pushed through regulatory standards that the automotive engineers have risen to meet. There is a kind of gold standard demanded by the government for cars and trucks in the United States and it informs their production worldwide.

“Street legal” is the operative threshold that drives manufacturers worldwide to clear the American bar, otherwise their products cannot be sold here. World production must comply with U.S. standards in safety, emissions and equipment, such as reversing cameras, now standard on all new cars.

This de facto world standard will allow a car to be sold and operated in the United States. Some specialty cars made in other countries – for example, the beloved British Morgan sports car, complete with a wooden frame and a leather strap across the hood (bonnet in Britain) – can no longer be imported into the United States. While they are not for sale here, they are for sale elsewhere in the world.

The final driver for better cars and trucks is the consumer. Competition in the automotive world is brutal. Automobile manufacturers must take an annual market test, answering these questions: Will the new models sell? Did we bend the steel in appealing ways? Will our claims of “happiness behind the wheel” be ratified by the public? It is a test quite unlike that for any other product, except perhaps movies. Is it what the public wants?

Now new challenges and new excitements are afoot in the world of automobiles. The old order of the internal combustion engine — so improved, so dependable and so much cleaner — is going to begin to surrender its hegemony to the new order of the electric car.

Much that has been improved for today’s cars, like tires and brakes, is to be found in the electric car, but the drive train is something different. It is something that is itself evolving: better batteries, motors, designs and new expectations, primarily of range through battery improvement.

The arrival of the electric car is evolutionary, verging on revolutionary.

The big impediment: How will recharging catch up and become as painless as filling the tank is today? In time, it will happen. Gouse is hopeful that one day there will be easily available induction charging (charging without wires) so that at a stoplight or in a parking place, juice will flow from the local utility to your car.

The automobile has changed and way we live and given us a unique dimension: the freedom to go when we want to go in great comfort with our everyone and everything: family, music, telephone service and, when autonomous cars arrive, maybe workspace. The automotive future is an open road.

 

 

Photo: Laura Gariglio on Unsplash

Electricity Is the Big Future Winner for Cars, Even Small Planes

electric car charging

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Electricity, the world’s silent workhorse for a century, is about to conquer new worlds.

While electric cars are coming on fast, their acceptance will speed up geometrically in the next decade, according to an extraordinary new study by RethinkX, a San Francisco-based research group and think tank. Indeed, the group is predicting a true revolution in electrified transportation.

In this revolution, futuristic companies with a lot of talent and a lot of money — like Uber, Google and Amazon — will be seminal players. Old-line car companies and the oil companies will have to deal with a new order in which their roles could be dramatically diminished.

The big winner in this transportation future is electricity. Even the electric airplane — an idea about as old as aviation — is surging forward.

While RethinkX raised the curtain on the future of ground transportation in its new study, Uber raised the curtain on the future of the electric airplane this month at its Elevate conference in Dallas. More than 500 aviation enthusiasts attended the conference: dreamers, designers, builders — and even venture capital investors, who have already signed their checks. Dozens of designs for small electric airplanes, using multiple rotors and batteries, were on display. Enthusiasm was incandescent.

This July, small, electric pilotless aircraft — crosses between drones and helicopters — are scheduled to go into service in Dubai. They are supposed to ferry single passengers from their hotels and other gathering points to airports and recreation centers in the largest and most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.

These small aircraft, with electric motors and batteries, have an endurance time of about 30 minutes. EHang, a Chinese company, developed them.

If Uber, and more than a dozen other U.S. companies have their way, similar aircraft will one day take their place in the skies of America and other advanced nations. Uber hopes to test-fly an electric airplane in 2020.

According to RethinkX, the private car is about to disappear, or to be rapidly reduced in importance. The report — which might boost the stock of futuristic companies and electric utilities, and depress the stock of oil companies and old-line car makers and oil companies — is making waves in the far reaches of corporate thinking.

Tony Seba, co-founder of RethinkX and co-author of the report, told me that mainstream analysts are not yet on board with the changes, which will rock the automobile, oil and electric industries. They have not understood the impact of technological convergence, he said.

He sees a future, about to happen, in which driverless electric cars, owned not by individuals, but rather by transportation companies like Uber, flood the streets, to be summoned by phone and directed by voice: “Take me out to the ballgame.”

Seba, an MIT-trained engineer and student of what he calls “disruption,” told me he expects a convergence between electric vehicles, automated driving and ride-sharing will come soon, reducing the number of vehicles on U.S. roads from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030.

“The average family will save $5,600 in transportation costs,” Seba says.

Apart from the transport companies, the big winner will be the utilities that will see a demand growth of 18 percent, Seba predicts. He believes present infrastructure can accommodate this growth surge because demand will be mostly off-peak.

There are similar expectations of a golden future for small, electric, vertical takeoff airplanes, incorporating drone and other technologies. The limit for the aircraft, which use lithium batteries, is the batteries. But the enthusiasts gathered at Uber’s conference say flight is possible now with present-day batteries and these will only get better.

Richard Whittle, a leading aviation journalist and author who chaired an Elevate session, told me, “It was a pretty impressive event.”

While the arguments by Seba and his co-author James Arbib, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, point to an electrified transportation future, I have one question: Will people give up the personal, primal pleasure of owning a car?

Seba and Arbib think so, pointing out that people used to take pride in their LP and CD collections, but now they access their music electronically.

The future is pulling up on a highway near you; it may also be flying overhead.

 

Photo: Håkan Dahlström, “Electric car charging station” 2013. Used under the Creative Commons Attributions 2.0 Generic License.

Disruptive Technologies and the Agenda They Set

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The copper-wire telephone is in danger, traditional advertising is drying up and health care costs are through the roof and rising. What is the villain? Well, it’s technology; particularly, “disruptive technology.”

Disruptive technologies are devastating to established order. And they underlie Congress’s consideration the most wide-ranging legislative challenges it has faced since the New Deal: health care and energy.

Hugely effective but expensive new medical technologies, like magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear therapies and artificial joints, threaten to bankrupt the nation’s health care system. At the heart of the health care debate lie the escalating costs for these new technologies and how to shoulder and control them. The rudimentary solution is to get the well to pay for the sick, in the way that Social Security seeks to get the young to pay for the old.

After health care, Congress has to consider energy and its leitmotif, climate remediation. Here, too, it is faced with new technology forcing the issue. Even as the Senate contemplates taking up the House-passed bill, with its heavy emphasis on renewables, new drilling and discovery technologies are tipping the energy balance towards natural gas and away from other competitors like wind and nuclear power. Ironically, at one time, nuclear power was a disruptive technology that threatened to elbow out coal.

In electricity, Congress can force the market away from the disruptive technology toward something it favors for social and political reasons, like solar or wave power. The cost is simply passed on to the consumer.

As for transportation, the energy imperatives are dictated by the forces of infrastructure and sunk cost. In the long term, there are four options that will keep the wheels turning:

1.plug-in hybrids leading to full electric-powered vehicles;

2. hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles;

3. ethanol-powered vehicles and;

4. compressed natural gas-powered vehicles

These options are not created equal. Hybrids are here but the batteries are expensive, and the plug-in option dictates that the car sits in a garage or a parking lot that is equipped with plugs for charging. Also, the batteries decline with time and cannot be used after they lose about 30 percent of their design capacity. If you live in a high-rise, plugging in your vehicle is not yet an option. Ditto pure electric vehicles.

Hydrogen is a darling technology of the green community, which marvels that it is emission-free except for water. Trouble is, there is hydrogen aplenty in nature but not free-standing; it has to be extracted from hydrocarbons, like natural gas, or from water, with huge electrical input. Why not use the gas or the electricity directly?

General Motors markets a duel-use vehicle that can run on E85 (85-percent corn-derived ethanol). This fuel was a favorite of President George W. Bush; but the environmental impact of putting so much farmland down to corn for fuel and the effect on corn prices has taken the bloom off ethanol.

Natural gas–which can be used in a modified gasoline engine and has been made more abundant by revolutionary horizontal drilling technology–is advocated by T. Boone Pickens and others. It has come late to the transportation fuel wars because of fears of shortage, now proved groundless. Natural gas is not without emissions, but these are about half of those of gasoline. And it may be the big energy disrupter.

Congress, reluctant to pick winners for fear of also creating losers, intends to throw cash at every option in the hope that the market can make the choice later. But the market is not immaculate–and less so in energy than almost any other commodity. Electricity has to move down a finite number of power lines, and transportation fuels depend on the nation’s 160,000 gas stations for market entry. You can expect the gas station infrastructure to, say, provide replacement batteries, charging points, hydrogen terminals or natural gas compressors. But can you expect it to provide all of these?

Maybe the gas station, rather than being the vital element in the new energy regime, will be rendered obsolete by disruptive new technologies that allow gas compressing and electric charging in home garages and commercial parking lots. Maybe the hybrid of the future will have a compressed-gas engine and plug-in capacity, and all this will be achieved without the traditional gas station. Technology enhances, modifies and improves, but it is hell on established order.

Leon Trotsky said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Congress ought to know that technology, disruptive technology, is interested in it. –For the Hearst/New York Times syndicate