Technological leaps should be made with care
JOHN LEBLANC FOR THE TORONTO STAR
By 2020, all new cars will be powered by a hybrid engine of some sort, according to a recent global report. This one is in a Chevy Tahoe.
A key argument was that the technological wonders required to put humans into the heavens produced spin-off benefits – Teflon was prominent then – for those of us stuck on Earth.
My instructor returned the paper with a note that said the space program certainly got us great new stuff but it was a very expensive, and not necessarily the best, way to do it.
He used the internal combustion engine to illustrate. It's a marvel of engineering, honed over the years into a reliable, powerful motive force. Still, he wrote, we might have done better. More than a century ago, it seems, we put ourselves on a technological track that may have looked like the best option at the time but, in hindsight, makes less sense.
Internal combustion is incredibly complex and, despite remarkable advances, still woefully inefficient: Even now, in most engines, less than 25 per cent of the fuel's energy accomplishes mechanical work – moving the car. The rest is wasted, and we get toxic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
But there are plenty of signs we're nearing the end of that technological road. As 2009 unfolds, we should see indications of what the new path will be and how long before we're truly on it. The key now will be to make sure it's a substantially better one.
Internal combustion isn't done. None of the alternatives – mainly electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles – yet matches it in range, power, reliability, convenience and price, and all still face technical and cost challenges.
But they're gaining, and judging by what the major car companies and hundreds of upstarts are developing, and promising, we're on the verge of monumental change.
The past year set the stage. Soaring gasoline prices and uncertainty about supplies knocked many drivers off conventional mindsets. Although prices have dropped, fuel efficiency remains a major selling point.
Add the global financial crisis, with hopes pinned on a "new", presumably greener, economy, along with bailout rules that stipulate change, and tough emission laws in California and elsewhere, and the momentum appears unstoppable.
Last summer a report by IBM Global Business Services forecast that by 2020 all new cars would be hybrids of some sort.
By that, it meant some combination of internal combustion engine and battery. But hybrids that rely on gasoline are likely just a bridge to the real transformation – that is, if governments offer support and adopt policies that let alternatives become competitive enough to stand on their own four wheels.
Many experts predict that with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to advance the technology and build infrastructure, sales of conventional cars would begin to plummet in four or five years, gasoline hybrids would peak soon after 2025, and the alternatives would reach commercial production scale by 2020 and own the market by 2050.
The money would be well spent, concludes a U.S. Energy Department report from March. "The potential rewards to the economy, environment and national security are immense."
This year, we should see how much enthusiasm there is.
It's an exciting time to watch the car industry. But it's also a time for questions about each alternative. Over their lifetimes, are they better? How much environmental damage is caused in obtaining the materials to build them? How much energy is consumed? What about the consequences of producing hydrogen or electricity for all our vehicles? Can they be recycled?
We shouldn't put ourselves on another unsustainable road just because it seems like the best option at this time.
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