The possibilities for improvement of my carlets are enormous. Polymers will make much lighter bodies; hydrogen fuel cells and long-awaited lithium-ion batteries will offer independence from oil. All will combine to make the hypercar Lovins has been enthusing about for the past decade a real possibility.
Electric cars are already performing mechanical miracles, as Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered recently when he drove the monster from Tesla Motors in California. ‘Faster than a Ferrari’, it reaches 100 kph ‘in just four seconds’; travels 400 km after being charged from your wall socket and, according to the Economist, is greener than a petrol-powered car.
Tesla’s electric sports car has lithium-ion batteries and a carbon-fibre body and is about four times more efficient in terms of fuel equivalence than the average American vehicle. With such a performance standard in 2007, it should not be hard to make it even more impressive by 2027.
But what about the downside of cars? They will kill two people every minute, worldwide, by 2027 if present trends continue; they already kill five people in Australia every day. A study done by Professor Barry Bloom of Harvard University and WHO (the World Health Organization) shows that, by 2020, ‘road traffic accidents would be the third biggest cause of death or permanent injury in the world’. Already they are the second biggest cause of deaths of young men after AIDS! Bigger than warfare.
They eat up 40 per cent of the surface of cities such as Sydney and Los Angeles and produce 8 per cent of our greenhouse gases. ‘Transportation consumes 70 per cent of US oil and generates a third of its carbon emissions,’ notes Lovins in Scientific American. And, to add one of my favourite horror statistics: traffic jams cost America $US100 billion per annum ($A13.8 billion for Australia), which rises to $US170 billion if you add the cost of accidents.
The odd thing about the car, as the British conservative magazine The Spectator once pointed out in an editorial, is that it is the last bastion of socialism. While masquerading as the ultimate symbol of free-enterprise individualism, it requires a colossal subsidy from taxes in the form of infrastructure (about $6.2 billion a year in Australia). Congestion charges in cities and widespread electronically tagged prices for using roads must follow, and will drastically diminish freelance motoring.
But will nations such as China catch up with our own bad example? Not yet, says Professor Peter Newman, of Murdoch University in Perth. He calculates that ‘the 200 million Chinese who moved into cities over the last ten years use around 2 gigajoules of transport per person’. This compares with 30 GJ for a Sydney dweller and 103 GJ for someone in Atlanta (USA). ‘Thus the 200 million Chinese use less fuel than one Atlanta or four Sydneys.’ This despite each of these two cities boasting only around four million people!
What is the secret? One obvious factor is that the Chinese are opting to live in high-rise towers while the Atlantans spread themselves over the lowest urban density in the world, courtesy of cars. Yet the average car trip in Australia (over 55 per cent of them) is less than 5 km- which, as Sally Campbell, of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Sustainability Institute, notes, is a bike ride of about twenty minutes, just the amount recommended to keep the typical Australian fit and healthy.
But there is another side to the Chinese ‘miracle’. Here is Kirsty Needham in her book, A Season in Red: My great leap forward into the new China : ‘One of the most confronting aspects of daily life was the complete disregard for rules, or human mortality, on the roads. A nation of novice drivers had been let loose en masse as car ownership suddenly became within reach of the middle class.’ On one bus trip she passed three ‘horrific accidents as brake failures sent coaches smashing into cars… When we finally passed the crumpled shell of the bus, it was a sickening sight. The bodies of the dead were trapped inside… I saw a woman who looked like she was sleeping, but with the eyes open, slumped against the window. An empty face staring through the glass.’
Red lights in Beijing are ignored, even on pedestrian crossings. ‘Humans were expected to leap out of the way’ And she gives figures for the experiment with car ownership in China that we can expect to see matched across Asia: ‘Traffic was now the leading cause of death for Chinese aged fifteen to forty-five. The WHO estimated 45,000 people were maimed and 600 died every day on the roads in China. Thousands were caught driving without licences or driving drunk in Beijing each year. In Shanghai, a third of traffic accidents were found to be caused by newly licensed drivers.’
And our kids are dying, too.
What if cheap oil runs out? Yes, we can exploit relatively expensive sources like shale and liquefied coal. But costs will be enormous. Planes can’t fly on much other than jet fuel (kerosene) and use vast quantities of it. What will be their prospects twenty or thirty years from now, especially with real concerns about the greenhouse contribution of jets (about 3 per cent of the total, according to the industry)? After the present boom in cheap international travel, could there be a major slump? Could that be why Boeing has invested in the smaller, more versatile 7E7? Could the giant Airbus double-decker, with its 550 seats, prove to be a size commitment too far?
I sat in Boeing’s mock-up of the 7E7 at one of their labs in Seattle. The first thing you notice is the deliberate effort to make you feel that you are really flying in the sky, instead of trying to pretend you are merely in a cramped, earthbound canteen-cum-dormitory. Arched cabin ceilings painted in blue and designed to give an impression of celestial height take away the enclosed, life-in-a-tube sensation, and even the windows are elongated, connecting you to the horizon. It’s more serene and even more natural than our customary flying cattle enclosures. Even the air is clean: ‘As pure as that you’d get from an operating theatre,’ I was told by the smooth-talking Boeing lab chief, who looked like a cross between Clark Gable and Biggies.
But what about those aircraft emissions? While they are only 3 per cent of the carbon total (compared with 22 per cent for ground transport), the effect of these gases is substantial-enhancing greenhouse problems and changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. There is already discussion of changing the preferred altitude of planes to reduce the damage caused by ‘N-trails’, the oxides of nitrogen that pour from their exhausts. There is also talk of ways to reduce delays at take off and landing, both responsible for substantial emissions
So what does the future hold for a means of transport that has determinedly and successfully wooed the budget traveller? The costs of the new draconian security measures and rocketing fuel prices could return air travel to the exclusive option it was 30 years ago. I now approach an international flight with all the enthusiasm I would bring to 24-hour root-canal therapy. I suspect others feel the same, especially with the prospect of having to eschew their books and laptops as on-board restrictions get worse.
There isn’t any other quick option for Australians who want to go overseas, so stoicism may have to go up yet another few notches. But surely fast trains would be a good inter-city alternative, if only governments were prepared to invest in infrastructure? As for the supersonic flying revolution, it now seems further away than ever. Concorde is grounded, and the experiments at the University of Queensland with the Scramjet (at upwards of eight times the speed of sound), though successful, are unlikely to have anybody other than daredevils such as Richard Branson (in vigorous old age) hopping on the promised three-hour flight from Sydney to London.