Why make more and more cars?

The biggest lament overheard at the Auto Expo 2014 is actually worth celebrating: a fall in car sales in 2013, ‘the first time in 11 years’.

Today, we produce 15 million two wheelers and three million cars. For a middle class population of over 50 million households, it works out to less than one vehicle per household — enough reason for the auto lobby to argue that our people deserve ‘more’ comfort and happiness. (‘More’ defines what we are today — demanding consumers above everything else.)

But should every household need a car, or be persuaded by social conditioning that it is depriving itself of happiness and comfort without possessing one?

The fact is, the persuasion works. Strapped inside a car, we feel in control of our destinies. The automobile is integral to the American idea of freedom, and that has become our idea as well. For some, the car is a unique family space (those enviously peering out of bus windows at the cars below understand that; they become what marketers call the aspirational class), for others, it helps them discover their aesthetics.

Our place in the social pecking order depends a lot on the car we have, or for that matter, whether we have a car or scooter or no vehicle at all.

If cars are so liberating, why not have more of them? The more the merrier after all. Their environmental and economic impact is too awful to ignore. There’s no point striving for fuel-efficient cars, if you are going to overrun the road with them. The fumes do — and will continue to — kill.

More cars mean more road space, more trees cut for those who want to fly across an expressway as in the US, more farmland disappearing and livelihoods disrupted. To argue that the auto industry is a job creator is nonsense. Buses and trains would service our modern economies better, employ quite as many people, and cut down on our oil import bill. They would reduce the emissions per individual. And they would certainly contribute to greater serenity.

There is simply no case for cars in a resource-constrained, environmentally challenged world.

But what should really clinch the argument is this: When we put up our windows, we shut ourselves to the world outside. The beggars, the odour of the open drain, the grime of the handcart puller cease to exist.

Full disclosure: The author owns a Maruti 800.

A Srinivas, Senior Assistant Editor

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