Goodbye to the gas pedal
A Volvo XC ninety is pictured at the Volvo Cars Showroom in Stockholm, Sweden, on July 05, 2017. Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that all Volvo cars will be electrical or hybrid within two years.
A Volvo XC ninety is pictured at the Volvo Cars Showroom in Stockholm, Sweden, on July 05, 2017. Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that all Volvo cars will be electrical or hybrid within two years.
(Jonas Estromer / AFP/Getty Pics)
Progress in electrical car development was sustained — a fresh Tesla here, a Chevy Bolt there. Until, like a thunderclap, came news that portends the eventual phaseout of traditional gas-powered engines: Volvo announced that every fresh model it will launch from two thousand nineteen onward will be either all-electric or a hybrid.
No vrooms and fumes? Get used to the idea.
The actual disappearance of traditional engines from Volvo showrooms should arrive in the mid-2020s, once customer interest in older gas models dries up. That commitment puts Volvo at the leading edge of a dizzying trend for manufacturers, the oil industry, the environment, drivers and the culture at large. We’ll always have “Little Deuce Coupe” and other fine car songs, but what rhymes with lithium-ion battery? Guess we’ll find out.
A look at global manufacturing plans shows the industry is going all-out. Business Insider says about a dozen companies, including Mercedes, Audi, Jaguar and Ford, will introduce electrified SUVs by 2020.Volvo, possessed by a Chinese company, plans to launch five fully electrified cars inbetween two thousand nineteen and 2021. “This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo’s CEO said a few days ago.
European-based automakers are driving hard to introduce electrified vehicles to serve with stringent fresh rules on carbon emissions. France says it wants to end the sale of gas and diesel-powered cars by 2040. The same type of political pressure exists in the U.S., where the Obama administration instituted stricter fuel-economy standards. Even if President Donald Trump rolls back those requirements, California likely wouldn’t. That should be enough to compel automakers to proceed adding electrified vehicles to their lineups.
Then there’s consumer request. Because of the outlook for higher gas prices and worries about global heating, expect car buyers to gravitate to electrical vehicles, as long as they perform. And they do. Teslas are as sporty as traditional cars, while the Toyota Prius hybrid, once a four-wheel buzzkill, also motors nicely these day.
The thickest breakthrough in electrical car technology is in battery power: The Bolt can go two hundred thirty eight miles without a recharge. That eliminates range anxiety — fear of running out of juice on the highway. Electrical car spectacle will proceed to improve, and battery costs will decline, until electrified vehicles match the cost and spectacle of traditional vehicles. A report by Bloomberg Fresh Energy Finance predicts that electrified vehicles will be cheaper to buy and have lower lifetime costs as soon as two thousand twenty five and will make up more than half of global fresh car sales by 2040.
Remarkably, electrified cars go back a long way. In Chicago, we mean all the way back to 1893, when an electrical buggy built by an Iowa chemist named William Morrison made an appearance at the World’s Columbian Exposition. While the Morrison Electrical may have had promise, it lost the race for technological supremacy to Henry Ford’s gas-powered Model T. The discovery of oil in Texas and development of a road system with gas stations assured the internal combustion engine’s dominance, as did its increasingly sturdy spectacle. It’s only now that electrified vehicles have caught up.
But an even thicker revolution is on the horizon. At some point, self-driving vehicles managed by artificial intelligence will grab the wheel from humans. Like them or not, autonomous vehicles will be safer and more efficient. So have joy, joy, joy until the robots take your T-Bird away.