On August 12, 1888, Bertha Benz, wife of inventor Carl Benz, sat behind the wheel of a self-propelled carriage designed by her husband and drove to visit relatives. Buying a new bottle of gasoline and a bottle of oil every 15 to 20 miles at the drugstore and pushing the car on the steepest climbs, Bertha and her two teenage sons managed to cover more than 60 miles in a day and write the first trip into the official history of the automobile. One of the car’s first rules on city streets stated that a man with a flag should move in front of it, warning gaping passersby of the dangerous mechanical wagon’s approach. All this was a little more than a hundred years ago – yesterday, by historical standards.
The automobile is very young. It is “on the threshold of adulthood” as a means of transport, just ceasing to be a “teenager”. Basic elements and constructions of this metal organism were invented at its infancy time. This means that the history of the car is just beginning and we shall read a lot of its curious pages in the nearest future.
In its “childhood” the car was an unsightly but very expensive toy. Its father locomobile, according to the memories of Henry Ford, resembled a mixture of locomotive, asphalt roller and tractor, but nevertheless actively used in industry.
With the replacement of the steam engine by a compact gasoline internal combustion engine, the car, in fact, became what we know it to be. However, the history of the steam engine did not stop here. Great steam cars were running on the streets in the thirties of the last century, was even designed a plane with a steam engine – and flew! Electric cars are not a modern idea either, electric cabs and buses carried passengers at the beginning of the 20th century. Operational parameters of steam, electric and gasoline cars were initially approximately the same: speed and range were not high, and technical complexity caused a lot of problems to the owner. Relatively quiet electric cars started instantly and accelerated well from a standstill. Owners of steam cars had to melt the boiler and clean the furnace, which regularly clogged up, but these cars were undemanding to fuel. Gasoline cars, noisy and fire-prone, became much more convenient after Charles Kettering invented and patented the starter, an electric start for the gasoline engine, and Louis Renault fitted his self-propelled carriage with a gearbox. So in the competition between gasoline, steam, electric and diesel engines, it was the gasoline engine that came out the winner at that moment.
At the dawn of the century, the gasoline car, a fast, light but also capricious and unreliable engineering marvel capable of outrunning a horse-drawn carriage, was affordable only to a few wealthy customers. One of the largest automobile dealers, the owner of Villa Mercedes in Nice, Emile Jellinek, sold a dizzying number of cars in 1903 – 140 pieces. Car owners were mostly noble families, wealthy merchants and industrialists. This category of buyers tended to see the car as a modernized equivalent of an expensive racehorse, so the first fifty years of automotive history is a history of races, records and racers with sonorous titles and large fortunes.
The slogan “The automobile is not a luxury, but a means of transportation,” like any joke, contains a bit of a joke, but as a whole captures quite a serious evolutionary turn in the attitude to the automobile in the 20th century. Born as a piecemeal, complex in operation and super-expensive design, the car has evolved radically over a hundred years. It has gradually, but steadily, turned from an “iron horse” into a compact, high-powered household device, in which metal itself remains less and less, and engineering solutions and high-tech more and more.
What are we likely to see in the near future of the car, say in 10 years?
Disposability
The increase in the reliability of the car is accompanied by a decrease in maintainability. Who would want to have a car stereo or an audio system repaired? Firstly, they don’t break, and secondly, if they do, they go to the dump. The same is true for cars. The popular idea that “They used to make “forever” cars, but today they are plastic and fall apart” is a myth. Yes, today’s car is not going to live forever, but for its estimated lifetime it can drive a distance which was unimaginable thirty years ago. It is quite real to drive a modern car of average price segment around the world without special preparation.
Fuel efficiency
The race between the increasing price of fuel and the growth of efficiency of all systems of the car leads to curious consequences. If twenty years ago the normal fuel consumption for a city car was 12 liters per 100 kilometers, today 6-7 liters per hundred kilometers is quite common. China has established the requirements for fuel efficiency, which must be met by each leaving the conveyor of Chinese car – 6.9 liters per 100 kilometers of way; by 2020 it is planned to bring this indicator to 5 liters per 100 kilometers. Similar standards exist in Europe, the US and Japan. In the near future technological perspective view the fuel efficiency of the car about one liter per hundred kilometers, and this means that the cost of fuel will cease to be important for the owner of the car.
Safety
As the car becomes lighter it becomes safer. The power and speed characteristics have grown so much that it makes no sense to increase the “pulling” capacity of the car further. Therefore, new engineering priorities are being formed, among other things, to reduce the risk to road users. Numerous systems of car safety expertise already include an assessment of its safety not only for the driver and passengers, but also for pedestrians. Life-saving airbags for pedestrians are no longer exotic.
Integration into the environment
The car is no longer considered outside of the road infrastructure, the complex intelligent system “road – car – driver” is evolving as a whole.
Scenarios of “car consumption”. Gone is the concept of the universal automobile, which is used for “a feast and a party”, it is replaced by the concept of a family fleet of cars – for different occasions, like clothes or shoes. Strictly speaking, trucks and special-purpose vehicles – fire-fighting, medical, postal – are also just additional scenarios for the use of a car.
The car is getting prettier. This should be disturbing: usually the maximum grace of a man-made object reaches shortly before it leaves the scene. Think of sailboats, carriages, tube radios, and gramophones. On the other hand, it’s still too early to worry: the mass automobile is still pretty ugly.
And what about eco-friendliness?
This fashion trend is rather artificial. Environmental requirements and standards are a side effect of demands for engine efficiency and increased road safety (lower speeds and higher efficiency result in lower emissions). When we breathe dirt and soot, it is not so much about “dirty” cars as it is about a larger Russian problem – the alienation of residents from their environment. The population of the megacity perceives it not as a place to live, but as a machine for profit and power, which do not belong to us and are not controlled by us. By making the megacity in principle a comfortable place to live, it is easy to reduce the concentration of automobile emissions many times over without changing the car fleet.
Automation and computerization. Robomobiles already exist, even those developed in Russia. The main thing limiting their development is not the cost, as one might assume, but the legal conflict created by the presence of a vehicle on the road that is not driven by humans: the issue of liability. This problem is likely to be solved within three to five years.
Electric cars
In the first half of 2013, more Tesla electric cars will be sold in the U.S. than each of the big three German brands. The electric motor is much simpler than a gasoline motor, with much more favorable traction characteristics, compact and reliable (remember how long electric motors of elevators in houses work, nobody fixes them, they are just replaced from time to time). New powerful and light electric motors and new super-capacious batteries appeared within five years after the market began to demand them. The problem so far is the means of storing energy. Compact, sufficiently powerful, lightweight and cheap batteries capable of storing the amount of energy comparable to several tens of liters of gasoline will be developed within five to ten years. Another problem is the charging procedures, here, too, there are already a number of solutions.
Hybrids
This is an intermediate variant, when an electric motor is used as a traction engine, and the electric power for it is produced directly “on board” with the help of the internal combustion engine.
Hybrid cars began to be mass-produced not so long ago, since 1997, when the first generation Toyota Prius was put into production. However, technically the first hybrid car appeared in 1901 – it was all-wheel drive Lohner Porsche, which from two gasoline engines worked two electric generators, supplying current to the four electric motors located in the wheels, and the excess energy is stored in the batteries.
Rotary and hydrogen engines
The seventh BMW, “pseudo-series” because only a few cars were assembled for promotional purposes, has nevertheless demonstrated that it is capable of developing 228 hp and 337 Nm of torque on hydrogen fuel. A network of hydrogen filling stations is already being tested in London, and nuclear reactors should not be discounted in the future. Today a nuclear reactor can only be installed on board a submarine or icebreaker, but it cannot be ruled out that tomorrow we will see it on diesel locomotives, and the day after tomorrow on mainline tractors, because the nuclear reactor itself is small – the size of a bucket, and everything else is insulation and protection materials. Improving reliability, safety and reducing the size of the reactor does not allow us to deny this option of developing automobile technology, but this is a matter for the more distant future.