An impending new age of ground transportation

It is the destiny of almost every technology: as societies get accustomed to their presence and their use becomes more and more widespread someone eventually develops an alternative that supersedes the old invention and relegates it to the oblivion or, with some luck, to the halls of a museum. Some technologies, like the roman alphabet, have demonstrated a great resiliency even after 25 centuries of extensive and systematic use; others, like the telegraph, have become little more than a curiosity in less than 200 years after the first functional units, even if it was a crucial stepping stone for the development of later devices, such as the telephone first and the internet later.

Both the ascent and the demise of any technology are the result of the complex dynamics playing out in society. Sometimes the promoter of a technology can spend years trying unsuccessfully to get the attention of the public, only to see how a relative newcomer harvests the product of all their efforts before their very eyes. other times the interest in the product starts to dwindle for no obvious reason until the business model eventually becomes unsustainable and is forced to stop. It is the interaction of an innumerable set of small factors what makes a prediction almost impossible. Still, there are situations where a technology is obviously at a crossroad that can define its evolution in the near future. From my point of view, ground transportation, in particular the automobile, is (pun intended) at such a crossroad.

Photo: Automotive Rhythms

For the big majority of human history travel on ground has relied ob animal force: either the one of the travelers themselves, when they traveled on foot, or of their work beasts, when traveling on horseback or carriage. The development of the steam engine and its application to the railroad not only freed the means of transport from its dependency on animals but also increased greatly the speed, the distance and the manageable volume of both passengers and freight. However, the need to lay tracks across (or even through) the landscape meant that only the most populous cities got dedicated connections, while the rest remained as "through stations" or gave up on service whatsoever.

However the situation changed radically with the invention of the internal combustion engine: suddenly vehicles did not need the heavy boilers, the water deposits and instead they only required a liquid fuel which was much easier to store and transport (even if it was more dangerous than coal). The automobile was born and with it the era of individual motorization had started. In the beginning, only a few chosen ones (normally from the upper echelons of society) could afford to own a car, but soon after World War II they have become so affordable that many families started to move to the suburbs because the quality of life was much better there than in the tightly packed apartments of the cities and the "only" price to pay for the improvement was the commute time on a car that was well within their means.

It has only been 135 years since the invention of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, but the technology has seen an incredible success, with hundreds of millions of cars sold around the world, resisting even very dangerous situations like the 1973 Oil Crisis, which could have ended with a complete abandonment of this means of transport. Surprisingly, all this time the technology has kept both the Otto and the Diesel engines as appropriate solution to different problems: while the gasoline engines are generally lighter and quieter for a similar level of power (suited for lawnmowers cars and small trucks), diesel engines are more efficient and durable (better for big trucks and heavy-duty machinery). And this statu quo has remained untouched for many decades.

However, the increasing awareness about the impact that humans are having in the climate through the (virtually) unrestrained emission of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels seems to have altered the landscape for ever. The demands to the automotive industry for lighter vehicles with better efficiencies and lower emissions meant that the performance of the new vehicles improved every year, but it never implied a substantial change of mindset, and until the arrival of Tesla electric vehicles were just an expensive curiosity. Hybrid electric engines had slowly been gaining traction among the most environmentally aware segments of society, but sales were still below 1% of all registrations as recently as 2015 essentially in all markets around the world. These days electric cars are certainly ramping up with as much as 10% of all car sales in Europe in 2020, but this acceptance necessarily begs the question: is the Tesla approach (fully electric vehicles with fixed batteries requiring long charging hours) the right solution?

Growing up I remember reading in a book about future technologies how, in the future, our electric cars would have interchangeable batteries, which is a remarkably insightful suggestion in spite of coming from 30 years ago: the charging time is, still today, very long compared to the time it takes to fill a tank of gas. Even with the most efficient electrical vehicles the driver faces 30 minutes of pause every three to four hours, what makes it impractical for long trips. To tackle this problem some taxi companies in Shenzhen have completely changed their fleets to electric cars with replaceable batteries, where the taxi drives into an exchange station and can get a fully-charged battery pack within four or five minutes. The packs that stay at the station get recharges while they are detached from the vehicle and they are ready be installed again typically within an hour, but without having to make the driver wait. The current disadvantage of this model is that it only works on a particular model of the manufacturer Nio, but standardization will eventually find a way to limit the number of battery pack shapes to just a few, so that this could soon stop being a problem.

The other alternative, that has been hinted in many movies and is being implemented in some cities, is giving up ownership of the car completely. Instead, a fleet of cars is available for rental through an app on your cell phone which also points to you where the closest free car is. While this solution is probably OK for a small fraction of the population, it could become problematic if it becomes too successful: crowded locales will run out of available vehicles, which will be parked idle in distant streets all over town. Of course, once cars start to drive themselves the dynamic reverts to a taxi model, which can still be problematic in situations of high demand, but much less if they become the dominant means of transportation.

The third alternative, which I have heard about for years but not followed too closely, are fuel-cell electric cars, which are propelled by an electric engine that obtains the energy from fuel cells that run on liquid or gas fuel. While this model is not intrinsically clean (it could run on fossil gas just like our cars run today on fossil gasoline) they can be "made" clean by using regenerative technologies to produce the fuel: using solar or wind power to generate liquefied hydrogen (and oxygen that goes back to the atmosphere) means that the net emissions of this kind of cars could be zero. Furthermore, this kind of plants could be tuned to absorb some of the excess energy that is currently being produced during sunny or windy days when the demand for electricity is low.

This brings me to the fourth and last alternative, which is also, in my view, the easiest one to achieve: feeding our gasoline or diesel engines with non-fossil alternatives. Considering the hundred years of experience that we have with this kind of technologies, the risk of the adaptation is probably small. Recently I saw an advertisement for a car that ran on synthetic methanol, which looks like an ideal solution: the mechanics of the engine are well known, range is acceptable within the usual tank sizes, refueling time is very short, and all that with the benefit of net zero emissions and the additional benefit that, contrary to the production of batteries which relies on the extraction of rare earths, raw materials are widely available all over the world.

I will finish for today with only a word of caution about innovation: coming up with new ideas, inventing new gadgets and processes that no one has ever thought before is an endeavor worth of praise. However, it is also possible to be blinded by the sheen of these novelties while other technologies only need a minor push to become comparable. Let us see what history decides in the next few years. Have a nice evening.