The Hindu Business Line : Waking up to driving in the future

It could be every big-car lover’s nightmare come true. But reality, as they say, is often stranger than fiction. Cars revolutionised transportation in the 20th century. However, with the current concern over the effects of vehicular pollution, is the future of personal mobility, as we know it today, in jeopardy? Our take on what the world could be driving two decades from now. Thankfully, right now it is only a bad dream.

Tata Nano, Suzuki Pixy and Nissan Pivo…Tomorrow’s hits?

The year is 2025. It is about two decades since the movement to prevent global warming started and about as much time since the current two fastest growing economies — China and India — started recording scorching growth rates ranging from 8 per cent to 15 per cent.

As they grew, their voracious appetite for resources, driven by a massive improvement in the purchasing power of the populations of these economies, have irrevocably changed the dynamics of the world’s markets for commodities.

Oil at $350

The one key resource that has quite simply been torched by the heat of double-digit growth in ‘Chindia’ is oil.

Two decades ago, when the peoples of these two countries were as yet discovering the joys of personal mobility, oil was trading at about $100. But the fantastic increase in demand for passenger cars in these two countries led to a near quadrupling of the number of vehicles on the road during the next decade.

The consequences of that growth in fossil fuel driven vehicles is what we are facing today. And mind you at $350, OPEC claims that oil is still going cheap compared to the inflation in prices of other consumer products. Fact is, if it is priced any higher, oil will not even be used as an alternative fuel, which is currently its only remaining source of demand. Tumultuous events during the first fifteen years of this century and millennium have shaped the way we travel today.

Greens in forefront

Twenty years ago, the campaign to prevent global warming started to gain momentum based on alarmist calculations about the effects of pollution on the environment and the possible setting in of a meltdown. There were of course ‘pooh-poohers’ of this theory back then.

Two decades and a four-inch rise in sea levels later, global warming is an everyday reality that we are living with and the Green brigade now has a strong say in policymaking around the world, though, it has toned down its rhetoric about global warming threatening the very future of the human race.

Thankfully, it is the Greens’ lobbying power that has been the reason why the ‘guesstimated’ huge crude reserves lying under the Arctic Tundra and the Canadian North have as yet not been exploited.

The automobile industry too has had to reinvent itself to keep up with the changes necessitated by the increased awareness about global warming and by the runaway increase in the price of oil.

The automotive indulgence of the 1980s and 1990s, when the trend of building bigger, gas-guzzling cars and sports utility vehicles started became the reason why the industry was vilified as an irresponsible polluter.

Stricter emission norms and higher mandatory fuel efficiency standards helped in the initial stages, but that was before the population of vehicles running on conventional fuels alone hit a high, thanks to the explosion of demand in ‘Chindia’.

Investments in developing new technologies for cutting back vehicular emissions started tapering off by 2015 for cars using fossil fuels. After all, there had to be a saturation point for squeezing out every ounce of emission efficiency from the internal combustion engine.

By 2012 the three biggest car buying countries were the US, China and India and since then they have tried innumerable measures to curb usage of cars that run on conventional fossil fuels.

Every measure starting from the basic levy of a restrictive road tax to an entry tax for private cars entering the major cities, and the more radical banning of fossil fuel cars for intra-city transport to subsidising fuel cell vehicles.

Good yesterday

Back in 2008, Honda launched its first commercialised version of a Hydrogen-powered car — the FCX Clarity. Since then, it has launched more vehicles on the same technology platform and so have others. However, though these vehicles have been fine-tuned to perfection and hydrogen-dispensing stations have been set up and have expanded into the major automotive markets of the world, the technology itself is still expensive and has as yet not come with the reach of mass-market vehicles.

Two developments have led to the expansion of a different type of automobile during the last two decades of oil price super inflation. One is the spurt in the generation of nuclear power that has helped keep the price of electric power low. The other is the fall in price of hybrid technology and its widespread acceptance as the most practical alternative to fossil fuel vehicles.

But the first few hybrids were so different from the ones of today. The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic hybrid were all popular in the first two decades of this millennium. Though vehicles of their size still exist, the transformation to ultra-compact hybrids started when this vehicle segment witnessed its first product launch in the Tata Nano in the same year in which the first hydrogen-powered car was commercially launched.

By the late 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium, there were super compact and two or three wheeled concepts like the Segway scooter, Suzuki Pixy, Honda Puyo, Volkswagen Up!, Toyota IQ and the Nissan Pivo that were developed.

But given the fact that much of the expansion in vehicle population was happening in the affordability sensitive markets like India, the low cost ultra-compact that set the trend for the others to follow was the Tata Nano. Other carmakers like Renault quickly followed suit with their own versions of low-cost, four-door, super fuel-efficient ultra-compacts that spread from India to other emerging automobile markets in Africa and South America. The Greens loved the ultra-compacts and in the past decade these types of vehicles have become the mainstay for the survival and profitability of the automobile industry.

Hybrid on track

The other thing that the Green brigade and the high oil price has managed to do is make these already frugal ultra-compact to go the hybrid way. The average car in this segment is now a plug-in hybrid giving the user a mileage of about 70 km per litre.

Today, these cars, many of them look-alikes, rule the roads of the world. In many countries, they have dedicated lanes for these vehicles and the others being reserved for public transportation that also runs on electricity. In some of the less stringent markets, owners of conventional cars have been allowed to retain the previous generation of vehicles in huge, multi-storeyed garages located in the outskirts of their big cities.

Driving is now just an attempt at commuting from place A to place B. For the more passionate driver there are racetracks, where, for the price of a month’s salary, he can drive a big fossil fuel car of his choice — a sort of real life video game — reserved only for the rich.

There is talk nowadays that the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. Worse, conspiracy theorists are claiming that cars as we know them today will face extinction like the way of the horse-drawn carriage that was made redundant by the steam engine and subsequently by the automobile.

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