Why We Keep On Truckin'

The American auto industry's general lack of imagination is one reason (along with labor, health-care costs, etc.) why Chrysler became so pitiful that Daimler essentially paid to get rid of it. "The transportation sector has been the least creative sector in our society," says Dan Sperling, a professor at the University of California at Davis who helped write the new California fuel standards.

Politicians, engineers and corporate bosses are all trying to figure out how to produce a greener fleet of cars while preserving profits and "consumer choice," which means the right to buy muscle-bound cars and trucks. There are optimists who see no pain ahead: We can take advantage of biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells and new materials (carbon-fiber thermoplastic composites!). Pessimists think the market alone won't wean us from oil addiction and curb greenhouse gases. They favor aggressive regulation, gas taxes, carbon taxes, etc. But what's environmentally desirable may not be politically feasible. California's fuel standards follow the market approach, letting industries come up with their own techniques for meeting the state requirements.

There are, in fact, a number of intriguing new Cars of the Future in development. Perhaps you've seen pictures of the 39-inch-wide Tango, a two-seat electric vehicle in which one person sits behind the other. The first 100 all-electric Tesla Roadsters will appear this summer, listing for $92,000, every one of them pre-sold to the George Clooney set. Toyota announced that it's coming out with a hybrid Lexus that will set you back $124,000. General Motors, meanwhile, has created a prototype plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, that starred at this year's Detroit Auto Show. But GM won't go to market until someone develops a cheap, reliable lithium battery.

A lot of the futuristic cars seem to exist primarily in the parallel universe of Hollywood celebrities and dot-com billionaires. Just try to find an electric car in a showroom at Tysons Corner or on Rockville Pike. Here's what you see in the real world: big honking cars and trucks. That burn gasoline.

"We're not going to see huge changes in 10 or 15 years," says Marc Ross, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Michigan who has focused on automotive technology. "You can't really change the fuel in that kind of time span. It takes time. It takes huge investments. We have almost 200,000 gas stations. The only fuel you could change in a time like 10 or 15 years is to add ethanol, to adopt a mixture that can be served from the same gas pumps. But if you want to do something different, like hydrogen -- hydrogen is very difficult to handle -- that's going to take a great deal of time."

General Motors made and leased hundreds of electric vehicles in the 1990s, and other companies, spurred by a California mandate, began their own such programs. But automakers saw no profit in electric cars; critics say the industry sabotaged its own inventions. GM recalled and destroyed its fleet, as depicted in the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Meanwhile, Detroit spent billions to hypnotize us into thinking we need to go four blocks to Safeway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle capable of scaling the Matterhorn.

"We've become so dependent on our cars. We value that mobility very highly," Sperling says. "It's stunning to me how little response there's been to these high fuel prices. It's contrary to what the media report."

Sperling has calculated the "elasticity of demand" for gas (which, for the record, is between minus 0.05 and minus 0.1). That means that every time gas prices jump 10 percent, the demand drops, at most, only 1 percent. The policy implication: Gas taxes won't help curb demand as much as you may think.

The debate about the Car of the Future isn't just about consumer choice; it's also about the health of the planet.

"By 2050, the number of vehicles in the world is expected to go up by a factor of three," Heywood says. "That should scare you. It scares me."

By e-mail, Sperling summarizes the policy dilemma: "Most (but certainly not all) consumers want more and bigger things: more and bigger vehicles, houses, yachts, toys, etc. We also tend to want more access to more people. If I could get to Paris in 15 minutes for $5, I'd be there every other night for dinner. The real story, then, is how to deal with the tension between private desires and the public interest. If everyone drove a Hummer and owned a 5,000-square-foot house with a large yard, then disaster would soon follow, and only a few rich people would thrive. The role of government is to reconcile these tensions."