Tesla: Car of the future?

"In 50 years, we’ll look back on the internal combustion engine and see it as a giant anachronism, like the steam locomotive.”  So declares Elon Musk, a software entrepreneur turned energy pioneer who sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. He has since put a big chunk of the proceeds into Tesla Motors, the first new American car company in years. The iron nexus of the internal combustion engine and gasoline has ruled in Detroit for a century, and upstarts like Tesla haven’t fared well. “The last successful car start-up in America was 100 years ago,” Musk observes. Even so, he thinks the time has come for change.

 

Detroit is about to be upended by a technological discontinuity even more disruptive than the arrival three decades ago of the personal computer: the rise of electric drive. Today, electronics make up nearly a quarter of a car’s cost, and by 2010, experts think it could reach 50 percent. Electrification started with simple things like CD players and seat warmers, progressing to individual systems like electronic disc brakes and onboard diagnostics. Today, however, a cutting-edge car like the BMW 7 series contains more than two dozen interlinked computer systems and dozens of intelligent chips and circuits. Thanks to dramatic advances in batteries and power electronics, mass-market cars may get the jump to go fully electric.

 

The arrival of the Tesla vividly captures the twin pathways of alternative fuels and alternative technologies that together are shaking up the world of cars. Simply put, both the juice and the jalopy are being radically transformed. This marks a significant departure from the past, when engineers sought a silver bullet in one alternative fuel or another. But the truth is that gasoline-burning car engines are much too good at what they do to be replaced by any one fuel or engine technology yet. That’s why both must change — and why the future belongs to an exciting portfolio of alternatives.

 

On the one hand, alternative fuels are challenging gasoline’s grip. Electricity, ethanol, hydrogen and even efficiency can all be seen as rival “fuels” displacing gasoline. But alternative fuels by themselves will not be enough to break the world’s addiction to oil, given its power of incumbency. Consider the Toyota Prius. The car’s innovative hybrid-electric drive greatly increases fuel economy, thus tapping the alternative fuel of efficiency. However, even if Priuses replaced every one of America’s cars overnight — a seemingly green utopia — we would still suffer from local and global pollution and remain hooked on oil. After all, gas keeps the Prius going when its battery runs low.

 

Kicking the petroleum habit requires electrifying the jalopy, too. The basics of auto manufacturing are changing from a grease-and-grime approach to one that treats the whole car as the ultimate electronic device. Electrification matters because it has the potential to suddenly level the towering barriers to entering the auto industry that have helped prop up Detroit’s dinosaurs.

 

Yet electric cars aren’t guaranteed to replace their gas counterparts. Electric cars undeniably reduce oil consumption; and studies show they are greener than gas-powered cars, even though they run on coal-derived grid power. But all that said, cars that require an overnight charge aren’t as convenient as those that only need a splash of gas.

 

The road ahead, in other words, is full of forks — but as the great Yogi Berra put it: “When you see a fork in the road, take it."