The Cult of Cars: Mr. Mulally and I Go To Washington

And at the same time, I, a grad student/transportation fantast, drive to Washington, DC, in a VW Jetta Diesel (“Green Car of the Year”) to attend the Electric Drive Transportation Association’s (EDTA) annual conference. Finally, Better Place announces their expansion to Hawaii. The atmosphere was, for lack of a better, less punny word, electric.

The first event of the conference entailed a “ride-and-drive,” which let attendees drive the “cars of the future.” I drove a Toyota Highlander: a fuel-cell hybrid electric vehicle with four hydrogen fuel tanks, an electric motor, a nickel-metal hybrid battery, and a power control unit. Pretty cool stuff. I asked the Toyota employee sitting next to me how to turn it on. “It’s already on,” she responded with an air of magic. Then, off we went, silently around the block, with nothing but water vapor on my conscious (optimistically assuming of course the electricity came from a renewable source).

Another passenger, an engineer, was asked if he wanted to drive. He said, “A car’s a car to me.” The statement was wonderfully out-of-place and got me wondering if the Teslas, Volts, and Better Place, all get us dazzled and distracted with what is essentially car pornography instead of looking to pragmatic solutions.

Thus, lets pause to ask a basic question: what is the utility of a car? To get from Point A to Point B, right? Many would disagree. Look at the number of car magazines out there and you might see that the cult of cars amount to more than mere utility. However, as an Australian transportation expert once told me, “The greatest risk when discussing serious transportation issues is to get mired in car pornography.”

This very topic was raised twice, first during the opening session when a panelist said we needed to promote the sex appeal of cars instead of just harping on about oil savings. Similarly, during a Q&A session with domestic and foreign carmakers, someone asked why Europe pursues low-tech, high-volume car models, and America the reverse? I do not know, but I am guessing the answer was somewhere in Washington. However, it appears the message may very well have been heard by Chrysler, as delineated in their new electric car strategy.

In my next blog I will follow up with some interesting findings from the conference, including President Taft’s electric car as well as our current grid capacity to plug 100 million cars into the grid…