Question about private car's 'Kodak moment' goes unanswered

Privately owned vehicles owe their success to an energy-rich infrastructure.

The energy demands of privately owned vehicles were discussed by a trio of speakers during a recent webinar.

The speakers - Dr Thomas Becker from the BMW Group, Christian Hochfeld from Agora Verkehrswende, and Dean Taylor from Southern California Edison - each had some exciting things to say about both hybrid electric vehicles and those which were purely electric.

The autonomous electric pod need to be
a common sight in our communities.

All were excited about the potential of the electric car, in all its iterations and how it will be linked to smart systems allowing it to play a role in helping level out the electricity supply in community grid systems.

And, beyond that, being linked to traffic flow systems, the self-driving car will quickly adjust to find the quickest and less congested journey for the passengers.

A question about whether or not we should have been discussing the private car’s “Kodak moment” went unasked as hundreds about the private electric car were preferred to one that challenged what is in a sense the status quo.

Although there were observations about the sharing of vehicles to reduce numbers on our road network, there appeared to be an underlying assumption that the discussion was really about privately owned individual vehicles.

Ideally, we should be considering what are still electric vehicles, but pods which are not individually owned, but are used by the public, on demand, and responsive to an instruction from smartphones, or similar devices.

A standardised pod, backed by a sophisticated electrified public transport system, would need a much smaller, simpler and cheaper to build road network and a person’s residence would not need any garaging or charging facilities as the pod would be recharged when it returned to its base.

When a person wanted to travel from A to B, they would summon a pod on their smartphone, it would arrive within minutes, complete the journey and either return to its base or complete another nearby movement.

Maintenance of the pods would be attended to at a central location.

The pod marks the end of the privately owned car, electric or otherwise, and a serious disruption to what exists that is critical and needed because of our worsening carbon emissions. 

Beyond that, the public pod is about equality, an urgent need in our rather lopsided society.