TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATIONOECD International Conference, Vancouver Canada
TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATION
A thousand policemen directing the traffic Cannot tell you why you come or where you go. -T.S. Eliot
The auto industry-one-seventh of North America's gross product, and the highest expression of the Iron Age-is about to trigger the biggest transformation in global industrial structure since the microchip. Ultralight cars molded from advanced composites can be severalfold lighter and more slippery than present steel cars, yet safer, sportier, and more comfortable, durable, and beautiful. Modern hybrid-electric propulsion can boost efficiency ~1.3-1.5x in heavy steel cars, but ~5-20x in ultralight, very-low-friction platforms. By synergistically combining these elements, state-of-the-shelf family cars can average ~0.8-1.6 l/100 km-twice that good with state-of-the-art technologies-yet also be superior in all other respects, probably including cost. This permits hypercars to meet public-policy goals of economy, environment, and fuel security simultaneously and without compromise-and to do so in a robust, radically free-market fashion, driven not by govenrmental mandate or subsidy but by customers' desire for better cars and by automakers' quest for competitive advantage. This process is already well underway.
Hypercars offer potentially decisive competitive advantages to early-adopting manufacturers: notably, an order-of-magnitude reduction in product cycle time, tooling cost, assembly effort and space, and body parts count. These advantages have permitted Rocky Mountain Institute's Hypercar Center to commercialize hypercars not by patenting and auctioning the intellectual property, but rather by putting most of it prominently into the public domain and getting everyone fighting over it. Two years later, ~25 current and intending automakers have already committed ~US$1 billion of private capital to hypercars' rapid introduction. Persistent cultural barriers in the auto industry inhibit highly integrated design, whole-car optimization, ~400-500-kg composite monocoques, software-rich cars, virtual prototyping, soft tooling, and many other attributes of hypercars. Yet RMI is exploiting powerful motives to overcome those obstacles by maximizing competition among an increasingly vibrant group of both traditional and new market entrants.
Hypercars, however, cannot solve the problem of too many people driving too many km in too many cars, and could make it worse by making driving even cheaper and more attractive. Making driving nearly a pure capital cost, crashing the world oil price (by discovering hypercars' "nega-OPEC"), and making cars seem environmentally benign (hence less of a spur to substituting negakilometres and negatrips for driving) means only that we'll run out of roads and patience rather than air and oil. Hypercars therefore both buy time for and increase the need for fundamental reforms in urban form and land-use. They heighten both the urgency and the difficulty of fostering genuine competition between all modes of access, including those, like colocation and telecommunications, that can displace physical mobility. Thus hypercars trigger wider processes with important implications for social fabric and human interaction. They are also likely to end the steel industry as we know it, and to accelerate the commercialization of inexpensive fuel cells that could rapidly displace existing coal-fired and nuclear power plants. Hypercars are thus part of a web of technical innovations and market imperatives whose largely beneficial effects will soon become far-reaching and irreversible.
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