A Need to Re-invent

Our world is progressing at such unassailable speeds that life over the past 60 odd years has changed exponentially. So much so that it’s almost impossible to comprehend the kind of atmosphere our grandparents grew up in…..technology back then must have been almost prehistoric compared to what we have now. Getting information (based purely on the winter night stories from grand pa) must have been like starting fire from rocks!!

Everything has changed so much that it’s almost impossible to find any constants between now and say 60 years ago. But looking hard enough I did find the most unexpected ‘constant’……the automobile.

Surprised? So was I when I first pondered upon the thought but then after a lot of googling and a bit of contemplation, the theory seemed almost believable! And now I’m so convinced about it that I am out in front of my laptop trying to force my point trough to you.    

Let’s start by getting a bit of perspective about the magnitude of change we are dealing with.
Back in the 50s all the technology available to most our seniors was a massive transistor radio set that took a major part of their living space and if they where really lucky they perhaps got to own an even bulkier tv set and the contents of these massive contraptions as I’m told was very limited. Limited in the sense of 2 channels showing a few shows weekly!
And now as I look around I realize….heck I get an exponential times the amount of content from my roughly 8 mm thick smartphone. Internet was virtually unheard of back then (except for a few top secret teams in the US working on it) and the closest thing to google must have been the oldest guy in the neighborhood.

But looking at the timeline of cars through the same time period, it becomes quite obvious that even though they’ve come a long way over these years, they have been unable to match the rapid progress of everything else. All the changes over the years done to the automobile have not managed to Re-invent the concept of the automobile rather all that has been achieved is its Re-innovation. Even after a hundred years since the first Model-T rolled out of ford’s factories, nothing radical has happened to the automobile. Their core remains relatively unaltered. They still are things that take in petrol, turn wheels and give out smoke.

Now one thing I’d like to clarify at this point is that I haven’t got anything against cars, on the contrary I’m the biggest petrol head I know. The beauty of form meeting function has an unparalleled appeal to me. And those who know me well enough will attest to this fact. But despite my clear affinity towards anything with an engine and four wheels, I still honestly feel that we could have done much better and could have come much further than we have. We desperately need to alter our perspective towards cars and think about them in terms of the future.  

Alternate energy to power our cars has to be THE way forward because we have already burned more than enough petrol and diesel and we have given out enough toxics to our air. Electric cars have emerged as a viable alternative, the concept of 0 emissions is convincing enough for us to think that electric cars are the way forward.  But then if we look at the bigger picture an obvious flaw in them become apparent. Electric cars run on electricity (yes the same stuff that powers everything from our TVs to a whole nation). But then this wonder source of power is made mostly in power plants having big chimneys which give out a lot of smoke.

Considering a reasonable figure of at least 1/3^rd of the total passenger cars to be electric in the next 10 years, we are still looking at a massive figure of 200 million electric cars (that’s right 200 followed by six zeros) by 2022. And that means we will need a lot more electricity than we do now, which means more plants with bigger chimneys giving out a lot more smoke. So basically the petrol and smoke that we are isolating from cars is only going to be passed on to the power plants.

So unless we don’t come up with a cleaner way to make a lot of electricity, the idea of electric cars is not going to feasible. So what other options do we have?So unless we don’t come up with a cleaner way to make a lot of electricity, the idea of electric cars is not going to feasible. So what other options do we have?


Well they aren’t many. You see alternate sources of energy hasn’t been of much importance on the ‘to do list’ of our auto giants and this lack of innovation means that the automobile world is running way behind its time. To solve this issue, the boffins at Ford and BMW and all other big names in the industry need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something radically different, something that changes the way we look at cars completely.Now folk at Mercedes have come up with one such idea, they call it The Biome and even though its complete fiction it gives us a rough idea of how different car manufacturing can be. Take a look at their brain wave -Mercedes Biome