I was looking around
at the cars on display here this morning, and I was thinking about a presentation I gave
at a J.D. Power’s Powertrain Seminar in May of 1997. In my presentation there was a
slide showing a futuristic hybrid car, and I said to the folks in attendance: "If we
had to build a hybrid vehicle tomorrow, this is how it would be built." At the time,
hybrids were still highly experimental and everyone believed it would be several years
before anyone could actually buy one. Well that was only 2-1/2 years ago, and the Toyota
Prius and Honda Insight - hybrid-electric cars with a range limited only by the amount of
fuel on board - will begin showing up on showroom floors in the U.S within the next few
months. In just a few months, you’ll be able to walk into your local car store and
buy one of these advanced hybrid cars.
Today, automotive technology is on the verge of a giant leap forward that
could be as revolutionary as when the carriage gave up the horse at the beginning of the
20th century. And it will not only involve new power systems, but it will
probably include new vehicle types - personal vehicles that we’ve only barely
envisioned at this point - and perhaps even a restructuring of cities and the way we do
business.
This morning I’m going to talk a little about why it’s happening
now…. Why it has to happen now and not 10 or 15 years hence…... Why we’re
investing huge resources through PNGV and other programs in what almost amounts to a
mini-going-to-the-moon effort…... And why we’re doing it at a time when gasoline
is plentiful and the price of oil is at a 40-year low.
So my role this morning is to get everyone depressed. A few weeks ago,
Christopher Mount, the curator responsible for the Different Roads exhibit here,
called me and said: "I read the first chapter of your book, and I’m so depressed
I don’t think I can go on… you’re just the right man for the job." So
if you woke up thinking that everything was pretty much okay, my job is to explain why
it’s not…. Why we are facing challenges today that are unlike anything that has
ever been experienced in human history.
Basically, these new ideas in transportation are designed to solve
problems. If we didn’t have problems, we could continue on with business as usual. If
it wasn’t broken, we wouldn’t have to fix it. To put it in the logic of Yogi
Bera, "the problem is that everyone wants to be somewhere else – and
there’s six billion of us - and pretty soon there will be 10 billion of us." So
the goal of these new approaches to personal mobility is to create a sustainable and
environmentally-benign transportation system – because the one we have is not
sustainable over the long term…... It’s certainly not environmentally-benign (or
even a little bit friendly)… And we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. And in a
few years, it could cause political, economic, and environmental problems like we’ve
never seen before, unless we do something now.
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