i love cars.

driving is one of my few passions. and i do it as much as i can.

environment be damned.

you give me an efficient car that takes electricity under the bonnet and i’ll drive it until the end of time. no problem. until then, i shall stick with my saab turbo. it’s not that i’m against clean fuels, it’s that i drive a fairly fuel-efficient car (35-40mpg) and, until they get this electric thing into mass-production and within my pocketbook’s postcode, i shall continue with life as usual.

but yesterday we thought about change in the last ten years. and i said we’d leave cars until today.

certainly.

ten years ago, cars ran on petrol. lots of it. and we heard rumors of clean fuels, hybrids that would save the planet, electric sports cars, clean diesel, hydrogen lorries, and personal train cars.

all to be had in the next ten years or so.

we still drive petrol cars. on the same petrol, give or take a few percent, that we did ten years ago. except that it now costs more than gold. or frankincense, for that matter. they are just as dirty as they were ten years ago. seriously. look it up if you don’t believe me. i drive a car that’s about that old. and it’s just as efficient in fuel as a comparable modern version.

hybrids are a myth. no, not their existence, their efficiency. the toyota prius is the prime example. let’s compare it to one of its largest competitors in the uk – the honda jazz. the prius has two engines, an electric engine and a petrol engine. the jazz has a diesel engine. the prius has two engines, neither of which is big enough to, well, drive the car. the jazz is peppy and light. which is not something that i would typically say of a diesel anything. (tractor?) but what about fuel efficiency? in the city, the prius gets something like 45-50mph. and that’s the official united states government of transport statistics. there’s no official test for the jazz, since it’s not sold in the united states and the uk government doesn’t do those tests, but anecdotal experience tells me that, in the city, the jazz can attain almost 75-80mpg. and without a fancy engine.

oops. toyota needs to buy more advanced testing equipment.

like a scientific calculator.

save the planet. sell your hybrid. buy a diesel.

everyone talked about electric sports cars before the turn of the millennium.

they talk about them now.

but who’s actually got one? tesla roadster? fantastic concept. where do i sign up? and where are we getting that electricity from? hydro? nuclear? not likely. much more likely to be oil-fired turbines. or (gasp!) coal. seriously, you sell me an electric car for the same price as my beloved coupe and i’m there. today. until then, please go back to your laboratories and get cracking.

clean diesel. enough said. i place this strictly in the category with “healthy rabies” or “sensible government”.

hydrogen lorries sound fantastic. no more smoke plumes. hydrogen anything. but that requires several things. first, they have to exist. then we have to find a way to extract the hydrogen that takes less energy than using it. zero-for-two. call me when you’re at even odds, please.

and then we get to my favorite. personal train cars. that’s the concept whereby all roads are replaced by tracks and we have intelligent train cars that we get in by our homes and link into the electric train lines to get us where we’re going. and they link with long trains that share parts of our pathways to improve efficiency and are only large enough for one person.

again i say it, you first.

build it and i’ll be there. today. tomorrow. whenever.

until then, could someone please answer one small question for me?

what’s changed?

forget it. i’m going for a drive…

a few weeks back, i wrote about yoga, organic foods, and environmentalism. and i left a long list of items that we believe have changed without serious comment. i promised i’d come back. here goes. this is the list - computers, mobile phones, the internet, cars, television, music sharing, long-distance calling.

and without further ado.

computers. ten years ago, we were using windows 98. it was a painful time. apple was a bit-player, linux was simply painful (although that hasn’t changed) but at least nobody had heard of it, bsd was confined to servers (ok, some things never change), and the machine of the day was about 300-400mhz (even apple’s new imacs and amd’s k-series machines). today, my phone is over 600mhz. and has more storage memory than my windows 98 machine. not, to be honest, that i had a windows 98 machine, but let’s talk about the big shift.

what did we do on those computers? i can tell you what 300mhz buys you today. a dialtone, a keypad, and a very sluggish web browser that forgets my username every time i open it. or a clunky windows 98 gaming computer for the more geeky among us. not that that’s a bad thing. but old versions of windows are almost as much of a pain in the posterior region as the new ones. and that’s quite a statement.

in 1999, we happily sent email, surfed the web, played graphics-intensive video games (baldur’s gate, anyone? simcity 2000, which game out in 1996, if memory serves?), chatted online, edited photographs, typed documents, and researched.

i don’t know what you do today but that sounds like a fairly comprehensive list of what the average computer user will do in the next twenty-four hours. what’s changed?

computers have gotten faster to allow slower software to run. hard drives have gotten larger to allow us to store larger, more inefficient software and our collections of music and video, which we used to keep on other media. screens have gotten larger so that we can use our computers as home theaters. which we already had. mostly because we had home theaters. i ask again. what’s changed?

mobile phones, perhaps, you ask?

my 3g iphone is the nearest thing to the star trek transponder unit that i can think of, to date. and i don’t know what i’d do without that level of connectivity.

but it’s really just a computer that i can fit in my pocket. and that’s exactly how i use it.

ten years ago, i carried a laptop and a mobile phone to dial up to the internet. and i could use the phone to talk.

in 1999, cellular reception was awful. even in large cities. you couldn’t talk in elevators. or underground. and calls got dropped while you drove. and people complained if you talked on the phone in your car. or in the mall. or in a movie. phones were massive devices with extraneous things like web browsers on them. and cameras. and digital media players.

oh yes. did i say 1999? i meant now. or did i? i can’t remember. i can’t tell the difference.

that leaves us with cars, television, music sharing, and long-distance calling.

cars i shall leave until tomorrow, since it’s a lengthy topic.

television, though. that one bothers me. we have been told that broadcast media is dead. and it should be. years ago, it should have been. ten years ago, we could tape and play television, pause it with a dvr, watch it on our computers, and download video. but we couldn’t have any show, when we wanted it, commercial-free.

sounds like today.

so tell me how television has changed? better resolution? sorry, i’ll just get the dvd.

music sharing. we did it then. we do it now. now, service providers try to stop us with bandwidth caps and mindless traffic shaping. then, it was easy. i give you that it’s changed. would you like to go back?

which brings us to the end of the list – long-distance calling.

now it’s mostly free for anyone who wants to use a computer. then, it was mostly free for anyone who wanted to use a computer. the only difference is that it’s now publicized.

oops. shhh.

change is good, they say.

i say, show me a change and i’ll think about making a judgement. until then, change simply isn’t good. it simply isn’t.