There is a joke going around about the best way to keep your car from being stolen.
Is it a new security system? Nope.
A new lock for the steering wheel? No.
An app that allows you to kill the ignition from your smartphone if the car has been started and you haven’t pushed the button? No, not even that.
Today the best anti-theft device is historic: It’s a manual transmission. How can this be? Simple. Young men steal cars, very young men. Most are under age 20.
Shifting gears is a disappearing art
Since few have experience driving manual transmission vehicles of any kind, four-, five- and six-speed gearbox cars aren’t popular targets. (It’s important to know that over 95 percent of all passenger automobiles sold in the U.S. have automatic transmissions. And while manual transmissions are still popular in Europe, you might have to special order one for a U.S. delivery Porsche, Mercedes or even BMW. And Jaguar? As Donnie Brasco says, “Fuhgeddaboudit.”)
What does this tell us? Except for devoted gearheads, we’re not as intimately connected to our cars as we once were. We’re primed for change.
Hints of future change
A few more anecdotes tell me we’re on the way to a very different transportation future:
— At a Christmas gathering, a friend talks about the horrors of parking in downtown Austin. He notes that a parking space now costs $300 a month and rents are rising fast. He’s thinking that instead of providing a parking spot for each employee, it would be better to provide a $300 per month “transportation allowance” and let everyone make the commuting arrangement that works best for them.
— Another friend is a woman in her late 70s. She is about to sell her car. But she won’t be buying another. Instead, she’ll take Uber everywhere. It will save money, she says, and she won’t have to worry about parking. So in the future that is coming, both the urban young and the urban elderly will be “early adopters.”
— There’s change on my home front, too. When I think about new cars I get confused. Internal combustion engines seem a little, well, quaint. Even the best hybrid vehicles seem dated today, kind of like faxing a document rather than scanning it, or having a watch that can’t report the weather or your heart rate. Result: The current plan for the Burns household is to run what we’ve got as long as possible — or until a mainstream all-electric choice appears.
The Guru view
That, according to some, will be a lot sooner than most of us think. “It saddens me to say it,” former General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz wrote in Automotive News last year, “but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.”
Consultant and solar power guru Tony Seba is more specific. He predicts that by 2024 the whole idea of owning an individual car will be obsolete, displaced by what he calls TAAS, transportation-as-a-service.
Yes, read that date again: 2024. Five years from now.
This is not a pie-in-the-sky prediction. In his book “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030” — a book well worth reading in spite of its desperate need for an editor — he points repeatedly to the rapidly developing cost advantage of electric cars over gasoline-powered cars, particularly if used in a transportation-as-a-service network. The cost advantage, he says, will be irresistible.
One side effect, he predicts, will be a deadly plunge in used-car values and a permanent decline in the price of gasoline as demand for both vanishes.
Will it happen?
I’ve seen the future: some of it will be retro
I’ll bet on the event: It’s gonna happen. I won’t bet on the timetable.
It won’t take longer because we’re all slow to adapt. It will take longer because Seba probably hasn’t considered another powerful factor.
Feedback loops.
If car prices and gas prices crash, the irresistible economic advantage of driving an electric car will diminish. Drivers will buy junkers. They will drive without collision insurance and joyously search for the cheapest gas pumps. They will take pride in keeping the old brutes on the road.
When the future arrives, much of it will look like the streets of Havana.
Sources and References:
Bob Lutz, “Kiss the good times goodbye,” Automotive News, November 5, 2017 https://www.autonews.com/article/20171105/INDUSTRY_REDESIGNED/171109944/bob-lutz-kiss-the-good-times-goodbye
Tony Seba, “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030, ” 2014 (paperback) https://www.amazon.com/
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Photo by Pete Johnson from Pexels
(c) Scott Burns, 2018