It seems as if every European vehicle manufacturer is eager to tell you all about the wonders of diesel power, as any number of fast, fun-to-drive turbocharged diesel cars at Challenge Bibendum illustrated. Clearly, Europe's carbon-dioxide emissions have been reduced overall thanks to the revolution in diesel power that has taken place over the last decade. But then you notice that the very same manufacturers that promote diesel with the too-bright gleam of true believers are the very same that lack any sort of hybrid technology. Diesel and hybrid power are simply two halves of the clean-air question. Moreover, the diesel advocates fail to understand that diesel-powered cars have proven themselves to be fast and practical long ago. The questions that remain have little to do with technology. First, diesel particulates have been identified as a health hazard, and soot filters with high-mileage effectiveness are becoming available only just now. Moreover, these new filters work only with low-sulfur fuel, which won't be widely available in the U.S. until 2006. Second, the typical diesel fueling experience is messy and nasty, and no one likes to feel as if they're in the middle of a Nebraska truck stop while they are pumping fuel into the car. Social issues-not technical issues-are the things holding back widespread diesel use in the U.S.
The age of hybrid vehicles is already upon us. The Toyota Prius was recognized with a design award, and we were told that you can drive this hybrid some 8500 miles and produce about the same air emissions as four ounces of nail-polish remover. While Toyota has announced a long-term commitment to hybrid vehicles that will begin with volume production of a Lexus RX330 hybrid next year, Ford's Escape hybrid and Chevrolet's Silverado hybrid weren't even on display, though they are supposed to enter production shortly. General Motors had an elaborate display of future technology, and its engineers sniffed dismissively at the Prius while they tinkered with an Opel hybrid, but the Japanese are ready to start full-scale production while the Detroit engineers are still trying to get their act together. GM itself has announced that clean-air cars are its best hope to regain market share in California, but so far there's no product to back up the public relations initiative.
The General Motors Hy-Wire fuel-cell vehicle was available for short drives by the media, and it revealed itself to be both impractical and silly. The Hy-Wire has a flat, platform-like floor that incorporates the fuel cell and electric powertrain, and then a body is fastened on top of it, which permits different bodystyles to be easily adapted. The idea came from design school students, and the concept predictably works far better in a one-sixty-fourth-scale Hot Wheels toy car than in a full-size sedan. The Hy-Wire's bulky power platform makes the step-in height equivalent to that of a four-wheel-drive pickup. The seats are perched directly on the floor so the outside of the vehicle will look low and sleek, but legroom is compromised severely as a result. Moreover, the fuel cell technology is far from robust, and a platoon of engineers with laptop computers was required to keep it running, as if the Hy-Wire were some kind of Formula 1 car. The Hy-Wire's false futurism is summed up by its steering yoke, which integrates steering and throttle control in a way that produced frightening cognitive dissonance in everyone who tried it. For all its zippy styling, the Hy-Wire is really about new kind of manufacturing strategy. Like so many design school exercises, the Hy-Wire discards decades of good design in order to produce little more than fresh styling.
The science guys with their green vehicles are always turning to you and saying, "See, it runs just like a real car." This might be a fine thing to say at a science fair, when every participant is happy that his experiment hasn't left a pile of scorched rubble on the ground, but it's not particularly impressive in the world of vehicles where we already have things that run like real cars. They're called, "real cars." The gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine has come so far that it can be tuned into a PZERO-certified vehicle-a government-certified zero-emissions vehicle. In short, the internal combustion engine is so clean and so fuel-efficient that few of the new clean-air technologies can presently rival it. There's lots of reasons to fret about the clean-air future, but most of them lie in the habits of people, not the technology of the automobile.
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