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which do not dent, rust, fatigue, and so on, it is very durable and has bet-
ter life cycle properties. It is also quieter, more comfortable, more beautiful,
and nicer in every way to the driver. It should certainly be competitive in
cost, and there is increasing evidence that it may cost less to make. These
are expensive materials, but very cheap to fabricate, just the opposite of steel
cars.The car itself gets radically simplified when it is that light. So it is the
same car, only better for the user, and we think people will buy it because
it is a better car, not because it saves fuel, just as they now buy compact discs
instead of vinyl records.
We are doing a complete end-run around the scholastic debates about
how many price elasticities can dance on the head of a pin, and how much
do you need to put up the gasoline price to induce people to climb into a
small, sluggish, unsafe, squinchy box. That is not what this is about. This is
a better car. It is not even small. But it is completely different in what it is
and how it is made and sold. It may amount to the biggest change in indus-
trial structure since microchips. In fact, we think it will be the end of the
auto, oil, steel, aluminum, electricity, and coal industries as we know them
(which account for about one-third of the gross domestic product) and the
beginning of new industries that are more benign and more profitable.
The main barriers to doing this are not any longer technical or eco-
nomic, they are mainly cultural, such as the “metal mindset” design of sin-
gle components rather than integrated vehicles, and basic decisions on
accounting rather than economic criteria—unamortized assets rather than
sunk costs. By the way, Hypercars, although they buy time, cannot solve the
problem of too many people driving too many miles in too many cars, and
they will probably make that a bit worse by making driving even cheaper
and more attractive. So there is an important parallel agenda of getting real
competition going in honest prices between all ways of getting around, or
even, for example, being already where you want to be, so you don't need
to go somewhere else—or just moving the electrons, and leaving the heavy
nuclei behind.
I would like to give you a little summary of how far this idea has devel-
oped. As a recovering physicist, I have been thinking in the background for
20 years about why it is that today's cars, after a century of devoted engi-
neering effort, use only 1 percent of their fuel energy to move the driver.
This is really not very gratifying. I think we ought to be able to do better
than that. The synthesis was first published in 1991, pursuant to a meeting
in the same year of the National Academy of Sciences on fuel-efficient cars.
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