The Automobile/The Love Affair Continues
YATES, BROCK
Brock Yates/The Automobile THE LOVE AFFAIR CONTINUES Let us take a peek twenty years down the road. But be forewarned; the view is fog-shrouded and the route is laced with unseen hollows and...
...a stimulating, informative, and generally persuasive assessment of the Reagan presidency.99 ARTHUR D. SCHLESINGER, JR...
...Name Institution Street State City Zip Please return to: Urban Institute Press Order Department 4720-A Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 53...
...The number who actually die while riding in passenger cars is less than 25,000 annually, and half of them are victims of alcohol in one way or another...
...B who will build these wonderful 1. ) machines...
...bold and unflinching ...,9 WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD 66...
...And you know what...
...Europe...
...Then came computer technology that offered exotic, electronic fuel-injection systems and suddenly, within five years, enormously powerful, clean, and fuel-efficient engines were infesting the market...
...The automobiles of the future will surely be safer, thanks to improved crashworthiness of the body structures, better passenger packaging, no doubt involving passive restraints (much to the outrage of unreconstructed libertarians...
...ORDER FORM Please send me the following book(s) right away: QUAN...
...I said there wouldn't be any electric cars, the diesel wouldn't be important, and we would not have the problem of the turbine solved...
...tion gasoline engine about to disappear...
...A massive study of the subject in 1984 by a research team from MIT produced perhaps the most thorough and unbiased examination yet published of the automobile and its future...
...There are currently about 500 million passenger cars in the world and they are multiplying like bacteria...
...many of them mired in mile-long traffic jams...
...In 1949 America built nearly 80 percent of all the automobiles on the globe...
...Rather than see the automobile diminish in use, we may see the converse...
...Let it be said that the current Pontiac LeMans, which is a German Opel design built in South Korea by Daewoo Industries and sold in apple-pie American dealerships, represents the wave of the future in automobile marketing and manufacturing...
...It transcends all social boundaries and nothing, including the periodic stampeding of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, dampens universal ardor for ownership.free society can do to control the ant-like invasion of the car...
...Nothing, including efficient mass transit systems, high taxation, Cro-Magnon Communist social engineering, or even the absence of roads, can stifle the urge for automobiles...
...Japan...
...Just in the last five years they have been made safer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting...
...Moreover, electronic brains permitted the development of slippery, aerodynamically pure body shapes, now being fabricated out of light, strong, durable plastic composites rather than traditional ferrous metal alloys...
...That caveat thus recorded, let us proceed...
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...Any number of automobiles, from tiny Honda Civic Si's to husky Cadillac Seville El Dorados now produce nearly one horsepower per-cubicinch of engine displacement, an efficiency figure unheard of outside specially modified racing engines a decade- ago...
...For openers, barring the intervention of worldwide war or depression, it is a solid bet that the automobile will be with us two decades hence...
...Most experts believe that the world automobile industry will be distilled into perhaps six monster, multinational consortiums with a few major "niche" builders like Porsche, Jaguar, Rolls Royce, Ferrari, and Saab filling the gaps that are bound to appear in a mass market...
...i.e., such exotica as four-wheel-drive that will adjust to changing road conditions, four-wheel steering, and anti-locking brakes...
...Instrumentation will be a combination of electronic analogue units that will transmit salient information to the driver without the moronic video game displays currently in vogue on some models...
...Iacocca is right about microprocessing...
...I said it will have four wheels, it will be a thousand pounds lighter, it will carry a sophisticated version of the internal combustion engine and it won't have a spare tire...
...Today that figure has slipped below 30 percent...
...The automobile is the ultimate statement of personal freedom...
...Despite attempts by some social engineers and visionaries to displace the classic, four-wheeled, gasoline-powered automobile with everything from subways and moving sidewalks to Bucky Fuller's idiotic Dymaxion three-wheeled whale, the basic layout remains inviolate...
...I missed on the last one, but I was right about the rest...
...The Third World...
...Japan, which has some of the highest traffic densities in the civilized world, has a booming domestic industry...
...Rigid body structures, electronically controlled engines and braking systems, wind-cheating bodies, etc., have created automobiles that are faster, safer, better handling, and more reliable than anything imaginable even a few years ago...
...Anyone who seriously believes that mortal man can see much beyond his own nose is likely to be a closet devotee of Edgar Cayce and Joe Granville while remaining slightly woozy from the heady vapors of the Harmonic Convergence...
...The possibility of on-board accident avoidance radar which, coupled with ABS brakes and four-wheel-drive (perhaps operating through hydrostatic drives involving small hydraulic motors at each wheel), will offer superb roadholding and evasive capability...
...Londoners enjoy one of the finest commuter rail systems of any major city, yet hundreds of thousands of otherwise sensible citizens daily endure hours of snail-paced traffic in the privacy of their own automobiles as opposed to the bee-hive compartments of a railroad car...
...The neo-Luddites would have you believe that over 40,000 of us die on the roads in cars each year, but that is an unconscionable distortion...
...Otherwise the prediction was pretty accurate...
...But the question nags: Will there be any empty space in which to drive it...
...The cars we will drive twenty years hence will be about the same size as current mid-size models, say 170-180 inches overall, with capacity for four to five adults...
...40=-\\\\\`^N,\\*N..\\\\\\\\\\\`^\`,...\-\\\\\\-N,\\\\ ',.\\\ .\\\\\ What is the Legacy of the Reagan Era...
...Lee Iacocca, a man elevated to guru status with his creation of the "new" Chrysler Corporation, recently expounded on the subject thusly: "I gave a speech in 1965 about what a car would be like in twenty years...
...But at present the worldwide industry is in a state of flux and no one, including -the most prescient observers and analysts, dares to guess where, when, and how any stability is likely to appear...
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...rr he age of computers has not only 1 infused new life into the old internal combustion engine, but has permitted designers to create radical drive-trains...
...That question is being asked in places like Los Angeles, Tokyo, and a hundred other major metropolitan centers outside the Iron Curtain (where the miracle workers of Marxism have craftily avoided the problem by ossifying their economies...
...TOTAL ut when does the potential for total urban gridlock overwhelm the needs for individual privacy and expression...
...To be sure, the car of the future will be a wonderful technological achievement...
...There are no clear answers...
...Such are the hazards of prognostication and I will therefore qualify what follows with a disclaimer: Futurism is bunk...
...66An extraordinary bookassessing the Reagan years as watershed years in political philosophy.99 MICHAEL NOVAK 66This volume is the best effort yet to interpret the results and lasting significance of the Reagan era.99 DAVID STOCKMAN 66This is superb social science.99 DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN 66A challenging.look at the present as it may appear when it becomes the past,' RICHARD E. NEUSTADT 66...
...The United States...
...The nightmares of a rigid, collectivist system aside, there is little a Exp...
...Europe leads in technology, but its industry is threatened by Asian manufacturers and only EEC barriers 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 keep the invaders at bay...
...Although some scientists believe that breakthroughs in super-conductivity may offer new life to electric-powered cars, which are now hamstrung by gruesomely heavy and short-lived storage batteries...
...Already the cellular phone systems of most large cities are operating beyond projected capacity because businessmen are engaging in commerce from behind their steering wheels...
...Despite the bleatings from the Naderites, the modern automobile has become a responsible member, of society, what with exhaust emissions at acceptable levels and highway fatality rates below two per 100 millionmiles traveled...
...Make checks payable to UPA...
...the view is fog-shrouded and the route is laced with unseen hollows and hairpin curves that can send the traveler spinning into the weeds...
...It was titled, appropriately enough, "The Future of the Automobile," and it concluded: "Overall the team is optimistic about the automobile's prospects, not only because of sustained demand, but also because cars have proved to be highly adaptable to changing conditions...
...That bloated total includes pedestrians, farm machinery, motorcycles, and trucks...
...I underestimated the importance of microprocessors, as we all did...
...I'd give that same speech today...
...A provocative look at the challenges ahead . . . required reading in an election year...
...That technology has been the savior of the modern automobile, which was headed toward oblivion during the 1970s...
...Japan was until recently considered to be the supreme threat, but they are now being assaulted by the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Malaysians, the Brazilians, and even the Mexicans...
...Moreover, will anyone care...
...A combination of draconian safety and exhaust-emission regulations, coupled with demands for high-mileage in the face of OPEC's rise, threatened to force manufacturers toward the creation of cars so underpowered as to border on the useless...
...Alternate working hours such as those instituted with great success during the Los Angeles Olympics might work, as will computer-controlled access to freeways, stiff center-city parking fees, and improved mass transit, but there seems to be nothing that will persuade the average driver to abandon his car as a basic transportation device...
...Car-clogged Los Angeles, where freeway traffic oozes along at less than 20 mph and people blaze away at each other with semi-automatic weapons, is still the most active and lucrative car, market on earth...
...No one has conceived or is likely to conceivea platform more universally stable than four wheels, nor is the cheap, recently sanitized, highly efficient internal combusBrock Yates is a columnist for the Washington Post and Car and Driver...
...They will be much lighter, in the neighborhood of 2,000 pounds, and will likely have such goodies as computer-controlled suspension that compensates for ride height, ride stiffness, and so on, depending on driving conditions, and variable-ratio friction clutches (CVT's) that will be linked, via closed-loop microprocessors, to the engine...
...the function of the car expanded to operate as a rolling office...
...Surely the development of on-board computer terminals and other sophisticated rolling technology will permit all manner of business to be undertaken not in the home, but inside automobiles...
...And new technologies offer the promise of providing even more flexibility in meeting shifting tastes and concerns among consumers...
...More complex yet is the question of where people will drive these wondrous new machines...
...faster, safer, and more efficient than anything we know today...
...The environmental and consumerist loonies were at full cry and centering much of their hysteria on the demon car...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
