Where’s the Cool Stuff?

The future of transportation lays dormant in the past

Ouch. An old wound was recently re-opened.

One of the automotive blogs that I occasionally visit had a story on the future of transportation. Not from today’s point of view – with our hybrid, electric and fuel cell cars slowly trickling into the marketplace – but transportation concepts from the late 50s or early 60s that are still futuristic marvels today.

It was a Disney-animated film that portrayed a look into the future of personal transportation. It featured automatic, self-driving vehicles, traveling on heated, high-speed (80 mph!!!) highways, with happy people sitting around talking, reading, and conducting meetings on video screens. These vehicles had the ability to separate into pieces with one traveling right, while the other left. Some had the ability to fly. All were fast, quiet and looked “futuristic” beyond belief.

Like the late 60s cartoon show, The Jetsons, the story lines were lame, but people watched because they dreamed of being there.

As an aspiring industrial design student, I remember studying the work of Syd Mead – maybe the greatest conceptual futurist designer ever. It was mind boggling how far ahead of his time he was.

I loved this sort of stuff. I wanted to design new ways to be transported from Point A to Point B. I grew up as kind of a car geek, but somehow wasn’t married to the idea that cars were the only form of future transportation. Was a thing that was shaped like a car, but drove itself, or could fly, really a car? If it was long, and carried a whole bunch of people, what would you call that? Call it whatever you want, I just KNEW that the future was going to be unbelievable, and I was going to be a big part of it.

So here I am, a few decades later, and you know what?

I’VE BEEN GYPED, CHEATED, LIED TO, RIPPED OFF!

WHERE’S ALL THE COOL STUFF?

Cars are far better now than they’ve ever been – safer, more reliable, and more luxurious – with a range of available options and amenities that can provide “all the comforts of home.”

But they’re still just cars. And, given the fact that they’re far superior to their predecessors, they still do basically the same thing as they’ve done for more than a hundred years. Even now they’re powered basically the same way. And if you think electric vehicles are a new development, think again. There were electric cars and trucks in the early 1900s.

Who ever convinced the world’s car designers and manufacturers that they had to stick to cars? Does the term “transportation design” refer only to cars?

Not to me. The irony is that a high percentage of the technologies and mass transportation concepts that were dreamed about in the Disney film are indeed available today. The design, engineering and manufacturing capabilities, and talent, exist right now.

So, why aren’t we there yet? The list of reasons could fill a hard drive – companies who are required to meet short-term goals to placate stockholders, research and development budgets reallocated to other functions, endless government regulations, complex labor agreements, differences in needs by geographic location, lack of universal standards, etc.

But the biggest reason is the simple fact that it’s easier to keep doing what we’ve always done, and just gradually make improvements. In theory, it’s a relatively safe, and occasionally very profitable way to spend a career or grow a business. But right now, given the current state of the global auto industry, I bet more than a few people wish they had spent more time on developing transportation systems, and not just cars.

I wish they had, too. It’d be nice to not feel burned every time something comes up that spontaneously lights an old internal fire.

But it’s nice to know it’s not extinguished yet.