Another "end of the Car" prediction

[Hachiroku]

From Autoweek today:

By MARK VAUGHN

Granted, this year's Tokyo auto show was something of a disaster. Floorspace once occupied by Ferrari and Aston Martin was given over to (I am not making this up) Kanack Praning Corp., and the car enthusiast's favorite, Nam Yung Lighting Corp.

The show lacked the international flair of the 1991 Tokyo show that debuted the Audi Avus, and the six shows after which trickled out the debuts of the Nissan Z and then the GT-R. Plus, more importantly, this year's Tokyo show lacked the traditional Audi free lunch, leaving hapless freeloading journalists to try out the official show free lunch upstairs, which wasn't all that bad and even included chop sticks. But I'm straying from my point.

You'll read the particulars of the show--the Lexus LFA, the Toyota FT-86, the Daihatsu DecaDeca--here and in AutoWeek magazine. I am not here to rehash all of that. I am here to tell you what it all means.

It means the end of the world.

I know, that comes as a shock. You were hoping the end of the world could hold off at least until the end of the 17th season of So You Think You Can Waltz With the Weasels and America's Next Top Self-Absorbed Anorexic.

Well, tough. It'll be over soon. At least the car-lovers part of that world.

"But Vaughn," you bleat, "on what do you base this hyperbole? Remember, you've been wrong before. When you were starting your own religion, I donated that $500 to the Church of the Everlasting Vaughn and not only did it not go anywhere, but it wasn't even tax-deductible. By the way, am I ever going to see any of that again?"

Nevermind that.

I'm talking about the end of individually piloted means of transport. Cars. I have been all over Japan for the last week and I haven't driven anything. Yet I managed to get from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji and back; down to Suzuki's new plant in Hamamatsu, where I saw more robotic spot welders than I had imagined; out to Makaharu Messe and to and from the Narita airport, which ain't exactly walking distance. I rode the rails or took the bus.

Similarly, in a previous life when I lived in Europe, I found it was just as easy to take the train or the bus as it was to drive, even when I had both means of transport available to me. New Yorkers, you know what I'm talking about.

There are 12 million people living in Tokyo not far from where I sit right now, and probably almost that many who come into the city every day to work in faceless office buildings and type pointless bureaucratic forms. From what I have seen of the city and of this part of the country, I cannot imagine all of those people driving individual cars on freeways and then trying to find somewhere to park them.

Wait, yes I can. I live in Los Angeles. L.A. is daily traffic hell. Any poor sap unlucky enough to commute during rush hour in L.A. is a slave to the 405.

Unlike Europe and Japan, we in the United States are still expanding into a frontier. Westward ho! Europe and Asia have reached the edges of their petri dishes. They have realized that everybody driving their own cars would be a mathematical and physical impossibility. You'd hit a traffic jam at the end of your driveway.

But we in America, our frontier is running out. Outside of L.A. there is desert. Tract homes made a valiant effort to carpet the desert between L.A. and Las Vegas but gave up when even Angelenos realized that they didn't want to do that. Short of paving Nebraska and replacing the corn with stucco, we too may be reaching the edges of our frontier. It was a fun 400 years, but now the party's over and it's time to try and live together peacefully, without road rage. That means cars are on the way out.

Sometime. I don't know when. We're in some sort of bizarre transition right now that could last a decade or it could last 25 years. We don't have to give up our cars yet, and we're still acting as if we can have all of them we want and drive 'em whenever we feel like it and ain't nobody gonna tell us different. You can have my carburetor when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

But it's changing. So go out there and enjoy it now. While you can. Go buy a Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and drive the tread off it.

Hurry.

Curious what everyone's thoughts are to these types of predictions about the end of the era of cars. It seems like people have been saying this forever, yet people rely on cars as much as before.

[S2KtoFT86]

Very interesting read. I don't know what to think of that as it's as much a part of our culture as anything. We use our cars so much that it's a part of us and who we are. Other cultures have relied on public transportation for so long that in the same way, it's a part of who they are. It would be a huge culture shock to us to HAVE to use public transportation for travel instead of hopping in our car and taking off.

Cars, especially for Americans, are a huge status symbol as well. We often times relate a nice car to having money and public transportation would ruin that for many (not me as I don't have money).

It's a very interesting time to be living in right now. Gonna be neat to see what happens in the years to come.

[Gost]

Lol, people in New York take public transportation because they have no choice. If traffic in Manhattan wasn't so bad (due to taxis), people would be driving to work instead of taking the subway. I doubt anyone in New York willingly takes the MTA and is happy with the service. The subways are overcrowded, they smell, it's always late, the prices seem to rise every year, and it's always boiling hot in the subway stations.

I live in NYC and I personally drive every day to work. If I took public transportation I would have to wake up an hour or two earlier just to get to work on time. My company has 8 offices located throughout the borough of Brooklyn and I get sent to a different office almost every week and I still drive regardless of what part of Brooklyn it's in.

So I would disagree with that article. Cars would never fade because people like us on this forum would try our hardest to keep them around.

[OldSkoolToys]

Cars may (probably will) fade in heavily dense urban areas (Like Tokyo, N.Y.C., L.A., London, etc.), but completely from existance? Nope, not gonna happen.

What moron in the rural areas is going to leave their house at 4 am in the morning to reach a bus stop 6 miles down the road, to catch a bus to take him 20 miles into town? No one. Not in the U.S., not in Europe, not in Asia, not...anywhere!

This writer is greatly over-generalizing when he says 'cars'. I think we can all agree that the days of the internal gasoline combustion engine are becoming numbered, but that doesn't mean cars leave for good. It just means their current hearts will be replaced with something that doesn't use up a non-renewable source of energy (I personally like Hyrdogen cells). I think this guy needs to get out into the country (sounds like he goes from one huge City to the next) and see just how amazingly hard it would be to get anywhere without a car, let alone make any form of Public transportation both reliable and convienent out in the middle of bum-fuck no where.

I also would have to disagree that gasoline diasappears for good, however. 50-60 years from now, when cars are running on god knows what, you'll still be able to get gasoline for your first true love, it'll just be god awful expensive because, in the world economy, if demand goes down, so too does supply. WOweee! Economics 101!

Anywho, guys a moron, or just writing something that'll get attention and get more people to read his article so he can boast about how his writing brings in more readers, or something, I unno.

The only thing I agree with is that we should enjoy these last decades of our roaring, responsive gasoline engines, and hope to God that some brilliant engineer finds a way to make cars run on something we'll never run out of, that doesn't smog air (I say smog, not create global warming. Take your political scam elsewhere) around us, but can still make us go 0-60 in under 6 seconds.

Cheers.

[7shades]

Come to Australia and try and live without a car... We have the same landmass as the USA and less than 1/10th the population.

Things are rather 'spread out'

But hey, if Mr. Attention Seeking journalist wants to catch the bus... Good luck to him

[Deslock]

Originally Posted by OldSkoolToys

What moron in the rural areas is going to leave their house at 4 am in the morning to reach a bus stop 6 miles down the road, to catch a bus to take him 20 miles into town? No one. Not in the U.S., not in Europe, not in Asia, not...anywhere!

4:00 AM?

I live in a rural area and often ride the bus. I (and most passengers) walk to the bus stop, but a couple passengers drive from their homes to the stop; they leave their houses at 8:00 and drive 10 minutes to the stop.

Riding the bus is not that bad. I save on parking fees/gas and the buses are fare-free, have onboard internet, and there is a website that shows where the buses are. Passengers are friendly and we chat on the way in. I also bring my laptop so I can browse the web, watch movies, or get work done.

On the other hand, I love to drive and it takes less time.

On days when I'm in running late or have stuff to do after work, I drive to work; otherwise I take the bus.

Doing both provides some perspective: Riding the buses makes me appreciate the fun, flexibility, speed, and independence of cars even more (while if I drove in 5 days a week it would seem like a grind). And when I drive in, being stuck in traffic makes me appreciate that if it weren't for the buses, there'd be a lot more cars on the road (and traffic would be even worse).

[Jordo!]

What anti-mass transit lobbyist wrote that?

It's not the end of the car... maybe the end of petrol guzzlers, but hardly the end of personal transporation.

Originally Posted by OldSkoolToys

I say smog, not create global warming. Take your political scam elsewhere...

A more accurate term might be "climate change."

I may regret asking this, but just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts regarding the validity of the natural selection theory of evolution...?

[Blokatos]

That was the stupidest thing I've read for quite a long time now.


What kind of idiot wrote this and expected for someone else to agree?

[Redline]

In New Zealand, everyone has a car! or two. cheap jap imports!!!!!
$1200 for my first car!

[808///M3]

For enthusiasts like us, the car - as we know and love it - is a dying breed. But just performance cars. Never mind the environment, the government regulations and efficiency standards are gonna kill off the fastest and "funnest" cars out there.

But we'll be driving "cars" for a long long time... they'll just be small and boxy, and motivated by technology much less exciting.

On the bright side, one way to move forward is going back to the basics of "doing mroe with less." Smaller and more efficient engines pushing/pulling a lighter chassis. Like the FT86, for example.

The Subaru 216A is excessive and therefore, doomed.






















































lol.

[cyde01]

i've lived in LA most of my life and i've spent considerable time in tokyo, and let me tell you, you start to appreciate the mass transit over there really fast. tolls for all the highways are mad expensive, there is no parking anywhere, and the streets are full of car, bicycle and pedestrian traffic. driving in japan isn't fun unless you get away from the city and out to the touge, or take the expressway in the middle of the night when it's actually flowing.

i'd love to see tokyo style mass transit in LA (but i'm sure they'd mess it up and make it like NYC), but no matter what this guy says it just ain't happening anytime soon. the detroit big 3 bought up light rail companies back in the day and eliminated them, and made deals with large cities to make them plan their communities around auto transportation. tokyo or nyc subways, trains and buses just don't work in LA, the city just isn't dense enough. you have to walk way too far from your house to the nearest bus station, and the distance from the bus station to the closest train station is way too far. in order to shorten that distance, you'd have to put stations and lines everywhere, but there would be far too few people using each of those stations to justify the cost because the population density just is not there. this guy's prediction may be right but it's gonna take multiple decades in LA.

[Gost]

Even with mass transit in NYC, a good chunk of people don't use it. Theres certain parts of NYC you can't reach by mass transit. His prediction wouldn't work in NYC even with the large population we have.

This is the NYC subway map:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/submap.htm

You notice that all the subway lines from Brooklyn to Queens run through Manhattan first, when you could just use the highway system from Brooklyn right into Queens without crossing any bridges. Mass transit is just too big of a hassle here for certain situations.
The subways don't even go to certain parts of East Brooklyn.

[OldSkoolToys]

Originally Posted by Jordo!

A more accurate term might be "climate change."

I may regret asking this, but just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts regarding the validity of the natural selection theory of evolution...?

I knew my comment would get a nibble. I should have clarified, actually, that by global warming I meant all the political-hoo-ah that goes with it. Quite honestly I think that if there were some undisputable, solid, clear evidence that we, as humans, were about to destroy the planet and send it to become the next Venus, drastic measures would have been taken by the Global community by now. Apparently small changes to pollution laws are good enough, at least for now, for these doomsayers, and apparently the fact that the two largest nations (population wise) are becoming modern Industrial economies more and more by the day, is also of little concern. Ergo, for the time being, its hog-wash. Its a contradiction in that light. Makes absolutely no sense from a logic standpoint.

Natural selection? Probably hog-wash as well. Look how many morons still roam these wild lands. Though thats probably an ironic answer of me to come up with in your eyes.

[OldSkoolToys]

Originally Posted by Deslock

4:00 AM?

I live in a rural area and often ride the bus. I (and most passengers) walk to the bus stop, but a couple passengers drive from their homes to the stop; they leave their houses at 8:00 and drive 10 minutes to the stop.

Riding the bus is not that bad. I save on parking fees/gas and the buses are fare-free, have onboard internet, and there is a website that shows where the buses are. Passengers are friendly and we chat on the way in. I also bring my laptop so I can browse the web, watch movies, or get work done.

On the other hand, I love to drive and it takes less time.

On days when I'm in running late or have stuff to do after work, I drive to work; otherwise I take the bus.

Doing both provides some perspective: Riding the buses makes me appreciate the fun, flexibility, speed, and independence of cars even more (while if I drove in 5 days a week it would seem like a grind). And when I drive in, being stuck in traffic makes me appreciate that if it weren't for the buses, there'd be a lot more cars on the road (and traffic would be even worse).

Thats awesome that you have some sort of public transit like that out in the middle of no where. Where I'm from, in the massive corn-clad lands of northern indiana, there is no such thing.