Why the car of the future sucks

It's heavy, crazy fast and increasingly unaffordable. Is this the future we want?

A woman looks out a window, her face bathed in morning twilight. The camera frame cuts to her hands, in which she holds a smartphone. Here we see an outline of a car and a battery charge indicator that’s at 100 per cent. The woman hits a button on her screen to set the car’s inside temperature to 70 degrees Fahrenheit before she leaves what looks to be her 7,000 square-foot house. Outside, a car silently illuminates to show that it’s now ready to move.

“The future,” says the voice over on a car commercial titled ‘Introducing the Future.’ “It’s impossible to see.”

Well, not really. Indeed, if we look at the car of the future — a car like the 1,111-horsepower Lucid Air from the commercial, for example — we see that there are big problems. Pointing to such problems can easily see you think I’m taking shots at electric cars for not being the climate-change fix few environmentalists claim they are. I’ll leave that argument to Diane Francis in the Financial Post, as it’s bunk.

My argument, rather, is that the car of the future could be worse than the car that exists today on all measures that matter to societies, excluding perhaps carbon. This is at odds with what we think we know about today’s car — that it’s a dirty carbon machine and that electrifying it in future will solve this singular flaw. Part of that is right: cars powered by internal combustion bear a majority of the responsibility for the climate challenges. But while electrifying cars may significantly address the carbon problem, car-industry trends, which include some of the downsides of electrification, meeting consumer demand and a global push toward luxury, are reshaping the very idea of the car itself. The future car — at least in North America — is big, unnecessarily fast, dangerously heavy, far more expensive, and not even a car at all.

Is this really the future we want?

1. The car of the future ain’t cheap

As recently as a decade ago, car companies still built one or several models to a super-low price to ensure almost anyone could afford one. No longer. The small, fuel-efficient and cheap car is dying, if not dead. Automakers are axing these models from their lineups because they don’t sell well and don’t make fat profit margins like SUVs. These cars (and they were often sedans, or even better, hatchbacks) are being replaced by faux SUVs styled to pretend they can go offroad. Thanks to the faux ruggedness, these models are less efficient and far more expensive than cars once on offer. Entry level models are also being replaced by hybridized or full electrified cars that are of a similar size physically but weigh a whole lot more than before and cost a lot more, too.

One powerful statistic to quantify this shift: A decade ago, less than 10 per cent of all vehicles sold were SUVs. Today? It’s roughly 50 per cent. And growing.

2. The car of the future isn’t even a car

Ford has killed the Fiesta, Focus and Fusion. Each were sedans (and also offered as hatchbacks and wagons). The only sedan Ford sells, or in other words the only car that Ford sells that is in fact a car, is now the Mustang. In the place of the Fiesta, Focus and Fusion, Ford now builds several new SUVs and a seemingly endless supply of pickup trucks. Why? That’s what North American buyers are buying.

Proof: it isn’t just Ford. Honda has axed the Fit in North America. Volkswagen has killed the Golf (aside from the GTI sport model) and Golf Sportwagen, and you aren’t able to buy a Toyota Yaris any longer. The SUV is taking over.

3. The car of the future is a tank

Weight is the future problem no one is talking with the car of the future. Exhibit a: the Lucid Air. While it’s a sedan and not an SUV (applause), the Air is a four-door vehicle for up to five passengers that weighs 5,000 pounds. That’s a lot. It’s roughly one third more than a similarly sized car of today that’s propelled by internal combustion or about equal to many modern-day pickup trucks. Electric vehicles have solved the range anxiety that has kept them out of the mainstream with ever larger — and heavier — batteries.

One good comparison for this is the Ford F150 pickup truck versus the new electrified F150 Lightning. Both are, arguably, overweight and oversized when one considers that most of us now live in an urban area. The gasoline version weighs in at about 4,100 pounds in its lightest form. The electrified F150 Lightning weighs in at 6,500 pounds.

Given that it’s physics — weight and speed — that create danger for anyone on their feet, on a bike or in a wheelchair in a city when interacting with a driver in a vehicle, this is concerning. And given that it’s weight that creates wear and tear on our roads, this is potentially a very expensive new trend, too. Or put another way: If you buy the new Hummer EV, which will weigh a frightening 9,000 pounds, should you get to pay the same taxes as the rest of us?

4. The car of the future is way too fast

If our vehicle fleet is shifting to electric vehicles, aside from weight the biggest shift will be the unprecedented increase in our fleet’s acceleration and speed. Electric motors produce their peak torque instantaneously; in comparison, combustion engines must be revved, and this takes time. This means that acceleration potential that was once reserved for the hypercars that a few hyper-rich people owned — Bugattis, Lamborghinis, Ferraris — is in future going to be offered in family cars.

The Lucid Air has 1,111 horsepower (or roughly 10 times as much as a 1995 Honda Civic) and is able to accelerate across a quarter mile in 9.9 seconds at 144 miles per hour (231 km/h). To put this in perspective, the 2010 Bugatti Veyron — 16 cylinders and built to be the fastest road car ever, and sold for well more than $1 million — produced the exact same acceleration figures. Put another way: Ever seen a family crossover SUV tie a Corvette in a drag race? Watch here.

Another way to consider this: what’s the second-fastest accelerating Toyota on sale today? Why it’s the plug-in hybrid version of the RAV-4 SUV, of course. It now accelerates in a dead heat with the company’s fastest sports cars.

Electric cars accelerate like nothing we’ve ever driven before.

In future, the slow, small, efficient car is dead. Given we’re forcing people into car ownership for mobility, given taxpayers are on the hook for maintaining roads that will be crushed under the increasing weight of these behemoths and given it will be pedestrians who are at most at risk when 5,000 pounds speed machines share space on streets in cities, isn’t it time to ask — is this the future car we want?

—CityHack

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*NOTE: If you like this post, and think I should go deeper on this, please let me know. There’s a whole lot more to say here.

Photo: Ganbaruby, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.