From Guest Blogger Ali Lawrence: The Future of Green Car Technology

Everybody feels like they are unique; like they have at least some experiences no one else could ever understand. They have idiosyncrasies that set them apart from the billions of other people that have ever lived. The same thinking seems to apply on a larger scale. Every generation thinks they have ideas the world has not seen.

They think they’re living on some unprecedented cutting edge and that somehow, the world’s history can be charted into a steadily progressing incline culminating at this particular point in time. Finally, we’re here. We’re in the future.

Sure, this sounds like an incredibly Millennial thing to say – and by that I mean self-absorbed, naïve and arrogant – but isn’t this idea of living in the future more true for this generation than any other? I mean, for the better part of the 20th century, people considered the year 2000 to be synonymous with an impossibly distant advanced space age future with flying cars and people living on the moon.

Future of Sustainable Cars

The future. Of course, they meant “the future,” not just in the general sense of a point in time that has yet to come, but in the sense of a very specific future aesthetic. Space. Cloud cities. Women with short hair. Robots. Minimalistic interior design. Tele screens. You know what I’m talking about.

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re almost 15 years beyond the mark so long considered to be the dawn of the future as so many people foresaw it. When Marty McFly traveled forward in time, he went all the way up to the year 2015. We’re very nearly living in the age of science fiction.

While we don’t yet have hover boards and tiny dehydrated pizzas that turn into twenty inch pies after we microwave them for a few seconds, we’re seeing some progress. But you know, the progress is a lot more realistic than we might have hoped. No we haven’t landed people on Mars, but we have landed a probe on a comet. While flying cars exist, they aren’t popular yet – where we are we still need roads – but the cars are a lot greener and some of those roads are made of solar panels. Our now-futuristic cars tell us a lot about the world we live in. We are more focused on sustainability and helping the environment than producing cars that fly.

Green Efficiency

It seems car technology is grounded for now, but while it’s stuck down here, we’ve figured out ways of using it much more efficiently. Electric cars are on the rise. Since we’re stuck in a science non-fiction reality, they’re not exactly in every garage in the country just yet. Far from it actually. The US government has dumped $5 billion into the electric car industry and there’s a decent chance tax payers aren’t going to ever get that money back.

But on the other hand, look at this thing. 3.2 seconds, 0 to 60, and no gasoline required. That’s not a sketch or a concept of a car, that’s a vehicle people are buying and using right now. While the infrastructure for electric cars – primarily widespread charging stations — isn’t where it needs to be for them to catch on everywhere, we do have hybrids.

Think of hybrids as like the probe landing on the comet – really pretty cool if you ignore all of the other cool future stuff you unreasonably want. You can drive a Honda Insight that gets better than 60 miles per gallon right now. They have concept models that are getting an incredible 80 miles to the gallon.

Even jut regular old gasoline motors are still improving. Ford’s Eco boost engine puts out a very respectable 310 HP, while still being able to get over 30 MPG. Whether you’re looking at electric cars, hybrids or just good old fashioned gas engines, it’s pretty clear the future really is now.