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Looking for a car — 10 years from now
It's time for new wheels. After 16 reliable years, my aging minivan pleads for retirement. I've kept it longer than planned because the past few years have brought bewildering change to the industry. I figured I'd let the dust settle.
As I scroll through hundreds of ads, I think back to the turn of the century, when buying a car was so much simpler. Echoing Ford's original palette of exterior colours, you could buy any kind of powerplant your heart desired, as long as it was internal combustion.
After more than 100 years of development, the fossil-fuel burner had been honed to the point where it was hard to go wrong with any purchase. While there were hundreds of makes and models, the selection amounted to lifestyle preference: Pick an appropriate size, style and luxury level, choose one from among several virtual equals, and plunk down your cash.
Things began to change in the first decade of the new century. Toyota's hybrid Prius, and lesser variants, signalled the end of internal combustion's monopoly. And carmakers old and new worked up alternative powerplants – plug-in hybrid, all-battery, and hydrogen combustion or fuel cell – each with myriad variations.
By early 2010 there was still scant real-life evidence of a technological transformation. Hybrids remained a tiny fraction of the market. And while billions of dollars were spent to juice the performance and cut the price of lithium-ion batteries – the heart of any plug-in or all-electric vehicle – most lurked in the realm of promise and hype, with only a handful of testers, notably BMW's Mini and the Tesla Roadster, in use anywhere.
Nissan leapt ahead around the end of 2010 when it made its all-battery Leaf available to American and Japanese government agencies and utility fleets, China's BYD employed the same sales strategy – essentially selling into the most controlled environment possible – for the Los Angeles debut of its E6 electric crossover.
Two significant plug-in hybrids – Chevy's Volt and an elaboration of the Prius – also hit showrooms in late 2010, in limited numbers. But the floodgates didn't open until 2012, when some of these cars went mainstream and many other companies added their own plug-in or electric models. Meanwhile, hybrids and "old fashioned" internal combustion vehicles got increasingly efficient: Conventional engines gained 35 per cent in fuel economy over the decade.
Most industry experts assumed plug-ins and all-electrics would require generous government purchase incentives and support for setting up 220-volt charging stations, whose operation could be controlled by the local electricity utility that could bill each user directly.
As I contemplate my purchase, most incentives have been eliminated and finding high-voltage plugs is hit-and-miss. Toronto still hasn't kept a long-standing promise to install them along residential sidewalks for the many, like me, who must park on the street.
Luckily for my sanity, hydrogen remains a costly experiment so I don't need to consider it. Still, I face a choice of four powerplant technologies, not to mention a dozen distinct battery types and, if I go electric, whether to buy or pay a monthly fee for the battery. And rumours abound that lithium-ion technology is about to be supplanted by better battery chemistry.
Analysts who predicted back in 2010 that internal combustion and hybrids would dominate the car market in 2020 were correct. But the Earth is warming and gasoline is getting expensive. Still, alternatives remain pricey; their infrastructure, uncertain.
Perhaps I can coax Year 17 out of the old van.
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