GM was the house that SUVs built – until this year. Recently GM’s management scraped the future of their core SUV program by killing the CXX (the next SUV phase for Suburbans, Escalades and Yukons) and are headed in a smaller, less guzzling direction. Ford has similar plans. Chrysler is just looking for a date to the party.
Hybrids rule, but Toyota rules them. Electric technology and other alternative fuel options are getting serious treatment by every manufacturer after years of back-burner fumbling. Still Detroit will get $25 billion in bailouts from taxpayers who never had enough money to buy a $40,000 SUV to begin with. Auto execs say they need another $15 billion. And why not? Banks got $700 billion. Where will all of this head?
Open on a beautiful sun rising over a junkyard of American vehicles. Some are worn and wrecked. Others look new. All are abandoned and piled in a heap, waiting to be recycled.
In the middle of this landscape of failed automotive mismanagement stirs a small shape. It is rounded and makes little sound as it zooms toward the descending camera. The little car drives up and stops and a woman gets out. The camera backs up and the car folds up and connects with other small cars just like it. She walks away. A man walks up, the car unfolds, he gets in and drives away.
AVO: Introducing the 2009 Bailout.
Cut to a line of cars in a row, each unfolding as people get in and drive away.
AVO: The future belongs to us all.
Fade to black.
There is no automobile named the Bailout, but there may be one like it down the road. It’s parked at MIT right now. I saw it last week. It’s called the City Car.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed this collapsible, two-seat, lithium-ion battery-powered electric vehicle that can stack in tight urban spaces like grocery carts. It fits perfectly with mass transit but doesn’t suck up petroleum, space or burp pollution like inefficient internal combustions engines. Ironically, MIT’s City Car was sponsored by GM.
Check it out: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/innovation.html
Each wheel is robotically separate with its own motor, brake, steering and suspension, all linked to a central power unit. The concept is not so much personal ownership as shared usage. Pick up your vehicle, go where you need to go, collapse it, stack it at the kiosk and come back and get one when you need it. Ever rented a Blue Rhino propane tank for your barbecue grill? It’s like that. You use it when you need it. They manage it and keep it ready for you.
This merging of environmental-architectural-automotive-transportation systems is a cultural paradigm shifter that may feel like slamming your F-150 into reverse while doing 80 mph. But that’s the kind of thinking it will take to get us out of several problems facing the world: Energy shortages, environmental issues, overcrowding urban areas, dwindling infrastructure, economic contraction and political turmoil based on oil. More than gas and cars, we have to wean ourselves from preconceived notions of culture, consumerism and lifestyle habits. That’s hard because Americans love their cars. But at what cost?
It will be difficult to get people to adjust to this brave small world, to be sure. Considering our options, on the other hand, it appears we have about as many as GM does these days.
Fifty years ago, GM president Charles Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Maybe it’s time GM’s sponsorship of MIT’s little City Car turned into something that is, indeed, good for the country.
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On a side note: If you are in the Boston area and have never been to MIT in Cambridge, MASS, you should go. Hit the museum on Mass Ave first: http://web.mit.edu/museum
Find out about Adaptive Intelligent Mobile Robots with Eric the Red. Want to get a good idea of how WALL-E will really be? Pay a visit to Kismet, “the world’s first sociable robot:” http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/robots.html
Walk past the massive buildings with names of scientific genius’s like Newton and Pasteur etched above. Peruse the course load without names, just numbers. Read The Tech (campus paper). Talk to the students, if you can keep up. Eat in the cramped Stratton Center. Google the famous alumni (example: IM Pei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Alfred. P. Sloan, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Buzz Aldrin, Csaba Csere, Amar Bose, Tom and Ray Magliozzi: NPR’s Click & Clack – to name just a few). Watch Ridley Scott’s movie Body Of Lies and pay attention to the MIT peeking out of Russell Crowe’s sweatshirt in one of the early scenes. Maybe other schools have more famous names, but few can match the depth of the behind-the-scenes mental firepower contributed to the world by MIT. Even Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke got his PhD in economics at MIT. He’s got his work cut out for him.
I walked down one of the busy hallways, jammed with students and math and science posters and a young man, smelling of soldering, came out of a classroom carrying a device that could have been taken from the professor’s car in Back To The Future. It was literally gushing wires and circuit boards and he carried it like a halfback on his way to the end zone. I asked a man who appeared to be cleaning the floors what was going on since it was Sunday. He looked at me without blinking.
“Thinking is a seven-day-a-week job,” he said.
Yes it is.