Burning Rubber - What future for cars?

As we hurtle towards this December's Copenhagen summit, there's almighty global momentum building around how seriously to tackle climate change. And in the end, whatever anyone might say, drastically reducing CO2 emissions implies drastically reducing energy consumption.

I'll be in Bath on Friday, that great Roman and Georgian spa city and powerhouse of British engineering, to talk at a Low Carbon Southwest event on a fairly contentious topic - cars.

It's been organised with Greenbang and the University of Bath. Joe and I have already been doing research for Greenbang - here's Ford's Nancy Gioia talking mass market electric vehicle with us in Detroit back in April.

We'll be exploring what meeting the energy reduction challenge in the car economy really involves. The event quotes the total number of new cars on the road as having risen by 17 per cent in the last decade.

But let me set this out more vividly, with numbers from the Worldwatch Institute:

The world vehicle fleet is estimated to be 622 million. In 2007, 71 million cars were produced, made up of 52.1 million cars and 18.9 million light trucks. In 2000 (remember, Millennium bug, parties, not long ago huh?) the fleet was 500 million. That's a 24% rise in just 7 years. Oh, and in 1950 the entire global vehicle fleet was just 53 million.

So when does the number of vehicles in the world saturate the market? Well it's already happened in key western markets. Yet the car industry still sees the answer as being to plough on and return to sales growth. Every big auto maker (there aren't any others) needs to see growth of at least 2% per year to survive in their current form. Who'd want to be in auto sales right now?

The first question is can this growth be sustained at the big picture level - can people move around with more and more vehicles on roads, while overall energy consumption from auto manufacturing, distribution and daily use gently falls, if we move to cleaner fuels and engines? The second question is what happens if sales growth isn't sustainable - if car sales are about to tip into permanent structural sales decline?

I'm going to focus on the latter and explain how it wouldn't be such bad news - great alternative stuff can replace those lost sales - vehicles we can use more, not less. Services that let us swing between modes of transport in ways we just can't today visualise. All this is possible with existing technology. And it can all be designed in a way that lowers overall energy consumption dramatically.

Of course, there's a third alternative. Moderately more efficient vehicles, gradual decline in auto industry, which adapts more slowly than society and its customers. Occasional death of car makers. No change. That's the one we need to try to avoid.

There's more details on the event here. It's free if you're a company researching low carbon stuff, if you're a designer or engineer or you are involved in low carbon startups.

The event runs from 9.30am to 12.30pm on Friday 2nd October at The Guildhall, Bath BA1 5AW.

Posted by Mark Charmer on 29th September 2009