In reality, self-driving cars are likely to overtake the market through a gradual shift in norms and features, a process that, Albert and Schwartz agree, has already begun. ….Many drivers regard autonomous cars as a pervert technology, like sex robots or Nespresso machines, and plan to reject the things as soon as they show up. Historically, he argues, planning favored car interests over “actual traffic habits.” With driverless cars zooming into view, he sees a chance to do the planning properly for the first time. Schwartz approaches the future much as he approaches traffic-as a complex, dynamic system-and his book emerges as a clearheaded bible for the twenty-first-century road. He also implemented early bike lanes and, in 1971, designed the failed “red zone,” which would have banned cars in midtown from late morning to midafternoon. It was he who took credit for turning the West Side Highway from a groaning overpass to a riverside boulevard. Schwartz is known to New Yorkers of a certain age as Gridlock Sam, owing to his role, in the nineteen-eighties, as New York City’s traffic commissioner and, later, as the Department of Transportation’s chief engineer. Schwartz’s “ No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future,” written with Karen Kelly. …A clearer way to think about the future can be found in Samuel I. “Had this period of random technological mutation selected for the electric, the social history of America would be unrecognizable,” Albert notes” The triumph of gas engines entailed a shift in the whole transportation model-from shared cars to privately owned cars, from an extension of the metropolitan network to a vehicle that required infrastructure of its own. Not for the last time, the makers of gas cars didn’t so much win the market as create a market they could win. Electrics-quiet, practical, and, in one engineer’s estimation, “tame”-took on female associations. “The internal-combustion car that had to be coaxed and muscled to life, with its lubes and explosions and thrusting pistons, that would be the car for men,” Albert writes. They set land-speed records-in 1902, an electric car briefly attained an astonishing hundred and two miles per hour-and, unlike internal-combustion vehicles, didn’t sputter out in traffic and need to be cranked up in the middle of the road…. They had faster acceleration, better braking, and powerful torque, which compensated for the heft of their batteries. Turn-of-the-century electric cars were more maneuverable than their gasoline-powered counterparts. Surprisingly, Albert reports, gas cars were the B-fleet for years. One assumes that electrics were only notionally in the running at this stage. “….in the late nineteenth century, electric cars and gasoline cars developed side by side. As Albert explains, how privately-owned gasoline powered cars took off eventually turns out to be an absolute random event. Now, over a century later, both ideas of electric cars and ride sharing are back in the reckoning. Not just that, the first adoption of mass market use of automobiles was in ride sharing mode. It is fascinating to know from Albert that indeed, electric cars were not just a reality as early as the beginning of the 20 th century but were considered the mainstay. Schwartz’s “ No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future”. The two books Nathan discusses in this piece are Dan Albert’s “ Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless,” and Samuel I. In this thoroughly enjoyable read, Nathan Heller looks at two books on the automobile industry to help understand America’s association with the automobile over the years, its impact on society, culture, politics in general and perhaps extend this evolution into the future to get a sense which way we are headed. Well, the concerns are global in nature and perhaps the history of automobiles can provide some cues. Indian auto stocks have taken a serious beating off late with concerns not just on the current cyclical decline in sales (perhaps the industry’s worst ever downturn) but also the threat of disruptions for the future – electric, autonomous, ride-sharing, etc.
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