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Running on Fumes
Does the “car of the future” have a future?
Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
…will a “super car” or a “FreedomCAR” or a “hypercar” or any of the other revolutionary new cars that have been proposed ever get built? Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, the authors of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future (Twelve; $27.99), answer this question with a qualified “yes.” Carson, who covers the transportation industry for The Economist, and Vaitheeswaran, a writer who holds an engineering degree from M.I.T., are “techno-optimists,” as opposed to the “eco-pessimists” they sometimes deride. Yet their argument rests on an account of global trends that is nothing short of terrifying.
Consider what’s happening in India and China. As Carson and Vaitheeswaran point out, car ownership in both countries has been and still remains, by U.S. standards, almost absurdly low. There are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and eleven for every thousand Indians, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans. But incomes in the two countries are rising so rapidly-the Chinese economy grew by eleven per cent last year and is expected to grow by the same amount this year-that millions of vehicleless families will soon be in a position to buy automobiles.
Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions. (To satisfy increasing demand in India, the country’s second-largest auto manufacturer, Tata Motors, is set to start producing a four-door known as the one-lakh car-a lakh is a hundred thousand rupees-that will sell for the equivalent of twenty-five hundred dollars.)
Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day. It’s difficult to imagine how such enormous quantities of oil could be found, but, if they could, the result would be catastrophe.
“Just consider the scale of the potential problem-for instance, the effect on global warming of seven hundred and fifty million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide,” Carson and Vaitheeswaran write.
(5 November 2007)
Here comes the £1,200 car
Manufacturers are focusing on cheaper vehicles for developing countries
Ray Hutton, Times (UK)
NEXT YEAR, Tata, the Indian industrial giant, will launch the world’s cheapest new car.
The company, which is one of the frontrunners to take over Jaguar and Land Rover, is bidding to capture a large share of the expanding Indian market with a four-wheeler for the price of a motorcycle.
This revolutionary Tata is known as the “one-lakh” car. A lakh is 100,000 rupees, about £1,225. It has been the dream of company chairman Ratan Tata for more than a decade. He promises a small, four-door car, with a simple specification, cheap to run, and attainable by Indian buyers who want to step up from two wheels to four.
As the Tata project comes close to fruition, vehicle makers around the world are planning ultra-low-cost cars, primarily for developing markets such as India but also with the expectation that they might appeal to motorists in western Europe.
(4 November 2007)
The one thing airlines cannot do without
David Robertson, UK Times
…The recent surge in the oil price has caught most airlines on the hop and they have not fully hedged their fuel requirements for next year. That will almost certainly mean higher fares for passengers, unless the turmoil in the financial marketscauses a widespread economic slowdown.
In such an environment, companies may be less willing to pay thousands of pounds for executives to fly business class and tourists will start hoping that global warming makes holidaying at home tolerable.
If demand does slow, it will be difficult for airlines to pass on higher fuel costs to passengers and balance sheets will take the hit instead. This could at last reveal the true state of the aviation sector.
Even the poorest airlines have been sheltered in recent years by booming demand for air travel, but a combination of high fuel costs and falling demand will expose the weak.
(3 November 2007)
