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I think of myself as being middle-of-the-road on the Peak Oil issue. I think it is likely that oil prices will rise significantly in the next 10 years, and it is possible that oil will become very tight in the next 20 years. Even then, I think we have technologies which, if widely deployed today, could give us a nice, but slightly different, lifestyle.

We’ll have enough electricity, if only because we have so much coal. I’m more concerned with the transportation technologies. I think incremental improvements will be made, but given the decades of hard work already applied to many of these things, we’ll have few revolutions. As a stake in the ground, I’d expect currently-known transportation technologies to improve no more than 100% from current best-of-breed.

That’s still good. If we moved to 70 mpg cars (our current best-of-breed) now, we’d get tremendously more life out of the resource. We’d get more years for engineers to chip away at “known” and “hard” problems.

You want to give me something out of left field? Great, that is where you can see >100% improvement, but left fields are a bit rare in personal transportation technologies. It is a valuable and well-researched field.

All this adds up to something quite a bit more negative than the traditional “economist’s position” that high prices will lead to a seamless transition to new transportation technologies. The other extreme would be “immobility” and “die-off” and I’m certainly not there either.

Maybe to illustrate where I’m coming from:

The second Model A was the second major success for the Ford Motor Co. First produced Oct. 20, 1927 but not sold until December 2, it replaced the venerable Model T, which had been produced for 18 years. The Model A was available in four standard colors, but not black.

Prices ranged from $385 for a roadster to $570 for the top-of-the-line Fordor. The engine was an L-head 4-cylinder with a displacement of 200.5 cubic inch (3.3 L). Typical fuel consumption was between 20 and 30 mpg (US) (9 and 12 L/100 km) using a Zenith one barrel carburetor, with a top speed of around 65 mph (104 km/h). It had a 103.5 inch (2.6 m) wheelbase with a gear ratio of 3.77:1. The transmission was a 3 speed sliding gear unit with 1 speed reverse. The Model A had 4-wheel mechanical brakes.

- more here

A 1927 Model A got basically the same mileage as my current model Subaru. Sure, my Subaru is nicer .. we’ve heard that before. But where is the best of breed? The current best MPG car in America is the Honda Insight which barely provides that 100% improvement over the 1927 Model A.

Given the rate of progress in the last 75 years, I don’t think we should hope for too much in the next 5 …

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 7:06 am and is filed under Environment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.