Death of the Gas-Guzzler

China turns to electric autos — a healthy competition

A trip by automobile is a pleasure and joy. All that’s missing are the aesthetics; manufacturers haven’t forgotten that there used to be a horse ahead of the buggy. Those words were penned by journalist and author Otto Julius Bierbaum in 1902 just after he completed a 10-week trip in a “carriage” from Berlin to Italy and back.

In those days, you bought gasoline from an apothecary. Today, 109 years later, the first electric autos are going into series production, and other means of propulsion will follow shortly. The International Automobile Show (IAA) in Frankfurt has already shown one thing: While the automobile industry hasn’t totally forgotten about putting gas in the tank, no car manufacturer can hope to succeed without including alternative fuel vehicles in its lineup.

In 1902, the world was getting ready to abolish the horse as a means of transportation. The decade that followed witnessed the birth of a completely new infrastructure made up of factories, filling stations, roads and refineries. For Bierbaum’s contemporaries, that major change was just as difficult to contemplate as it is for us today when faced with the end of the shortcomings of the age of oil, climate change and environmental destruction.

Whether the new technologies will develop rapidly enough is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain: It won’t be a revolution, but an evolution. What gives us hope, absent all the empty promises of the ecologists, is the fact that it’s all about money. Whoever reduces our energy consumption, irrespective of how that’s accomplished, will sell more vehicles. China brings in a beneficial level of competition because their approach isn’t to see who can build better gasoline engines, but to involve themselves directly with developing electric cars.

In 1902 Bierbaum wrote, “The time for mere experimentation is past.”

It’s a sentence that applies just as well to the horse’s successor.