Electric cars.

Contrary to popular opinion, disruptive technologies do not descend on us tsunami-like without a tsunami warning system. We don’t just wake up one day with teleportation devices in every room. Rather, they arrive in fits and starts while the economics of change does its dance, touching its teeny risk-averse toes into the inevitability of time. Yikes, that’s cold.

Electric vehicles have taken that journey, a drunken walk of success and failure, attempting to replace the entire 120 years of infrastructure that supports the internal combustion engine. Human beings have had many generations to become comfortable with an engine that, may I remind the reader, relies on thousands of these little EXPLOSIONS to drive a metal piston up and down and then IN ADDITION requires a Rube Goldberg system of gears and pulleys to translate that up and down motion into circular motion to drive wheels. I mean it’s incredible it works at all. Of course back in the day it disrupted the advanced horse and buggy technology, with much neighing and gnashing of teeth.

Tempus begins fugiting all over the place and when something comes along to possibly replace this engine, and there is fierce resistance for good reason. It is not just the engine that is being replaced, but significant parts of the entire automotive supply chain from manufacturing plants to parts providers to gas stations to car dealerships. This is a very big deal. We tend to forget how much of our world is tied to the car. We may own the car, but equally, the car owns us.

Electric cars have far fewer moving parts and thus in theory will require less maintenance. They can be “fueled” from home. They are more environmentally friendly. The electric motor generates more torque quicker than the gas motor.

Of course there is an infrastructure to build, battery technology must continue to improve and prices come down, but to me this seems like an idea whose time has come.

Here is the past / future of transportation as I see it: