According to Ray Bradbury, one of the world's leading science fiction writers and author of such classics as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, traffic on our nation's major highways will freeze with gridlock, and only then will people decide to change their driving habits.
"We're going to be forced into new solutions just as we were forced into space," said Bradbury in a Green Car Journal interview. Bradbury reminds us that unusual circumstances made for an acceptance of space travel, with America's race for space driven not by the general population's desire to go to the moon, but rather by a reaction to political events during the Cold War. Similarly, Bradbury expects that a complete rethinking of our transportation system will be driven by reaction to events over the next five to seven years, not by a desire for change. In the interview, Bradbury says that, simply, "we're going to be forced to look at the automobile and freeways because they're not working."
Bradbury isn't alone in pointing out the need for change. In Green Car Journal's Winter 2004/2005 issue, Amory Lovins, noted physicist and CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute, discusses how the application of advanced automotive technologies can create highly efficient vehicles that help resolve America's dependence on foreign oil.
Lovins supports his perspective with a look at specific examples of advanced automotive design and manufacturing work at BMW, Honda, Porsche, and Toyota, along with an RMI Hypercar project that examines a virtually designed, production costed, and manufacturable crossover vehicle that uses these, and other, technologies. The RMI team's new Pentagon co-sponsored study, Winning the Oil Endgame, documents these advances.
"It shows how to save half of U.S. oil use at $12/barrel, and then replace the rest with biofuels and saved natural gas," said Lovins in the article. "That would eliminate U.S. oil use by 2050 -- without needing federal legislation, CAFE, or gasoline taxes, but led by business for profit."
