Reflecting on my disappointment with Why We Drive, a few ideas for the enthusiast driver.
It seems to me that if lovers of recreational driving, be it track days or simply cruising through the canyons, are serious, they should really be working to minimize functional driving — the daily commuting cycle and the school run, the shopping trip. Consider how many times we have had to drive to a store to pick up an item, maybe a prescription weighing ounces, and driven a two ton car a handful of miles to do it. Or how many commutes are across built-up areas, not across fields or undeveloped land, and the resulting congestion that could be served via some kind of transit network?
This history of the electric car is interesting, noting a few points that I think still hold up.
This —
In the years that followed, as more people bought private cars, electric vehicles took on a new connotation: they were women’s cars. This association arose because they were suitable for short, local trips, did not require hand cranking to start or gear shifting to operate, and were extremely reliable by virtue of their simple design. As an advertisement for Babcock Electric vehicles put it in 1910, “She who drives a Babcock Electric has nothing to fear”. The implication was that women, unable to cope with the complexities of driving and maintaining petrol vehicles, should buy electric vehicles instead. Men, by contrast, were assumed to be more capable mechanics, for whom greater complexity and lower reliability were prices worth paying for powerful, manly petrol vehicles with superior performance and range.
— aligns with my own observations of the first few Tesla Model S cars I saw. They were all driven by women in their 40s or 50s and it made sense to me: I haven’t known many women (or men these days, to be honest) who care about torques or horsepower or know anything about maintenance intervals. They just want to get in and go: that’s reasonable, given that cars have been a mass-market product for 100 years. And now of course we see the Tesla as the car no one wants to drive…their enthusiasts can simultaneously laud the performance while they wait for the car to drive itself. If self-driving was the goal all along, why does it look like a car that requires a driver?
I’m not sure this gets it right:
The future of urban transport will not be based on a single technology, but on a diverse mixture of transport systems, knitted together by smartphone technology. Collectively, ride-hailing, micromobility and on-demand car rental offer new approaches to transport that provide the convenience of a private car without the need to own one, for a growing fraction of journeys. Horace Dediu, a technology analyst, calls this “unbundling the car”, as cheaper, quicker, cleaner and more convenient alternatives slowly chip away at the rationale for mass car ownership.
I don’t think there is a model for the urban car: for me, you can build a city for cars or for people but you can’t have both. Cars take up a lot of room as they are, and they require far too much land when in motion and when stored/parked. We’ve all seen the comparisons of how many more people can be carried by increasingly dense forms of transport, from bicycles to buses. Even a car with all seats occupied doesn’t come close to what a bus can carry and there is no real difference in speed in the city. If you were to log your journeys in a city, you would likely find, as I have, that you rarely average more than 30 miles an hour, and generally closer to 20. And for that you don’t require 200 horsepower to move two tons of sheetmetal. An e-bike, a scooter, an as-yet undesigned urban utility transport — a driver and some room for passengers or cargo, in a much smaller footprint and a top speed of 30 mph — would be all you needed in the event a bus or bike didn’t work.
So the enlightened petrolhead would be all in on transit and bikes and grade/use-separated roads, to preserve her enjoyment of the hobby. Arguing for safer roads with fewer cars aligns really well with being a enthusiast. Fewer and better drivers, more options to get around that don’t put cars on the road means fewer hoonigans with “MOVE RIGHT” window decals. Not sure we’ll have fewer fartcan exhaust mods but we take the rough with the smooth, I guess.
Addendum: you don’t have to do a lot of ciphering to see how low average travel speeds are, from surface streets to highways. A sampling of trips logged by my insurance company’s widget…
