• A 5 to 60 percent increase in car energy consumption due to people choosing to use highly automated cars in situations where they would have previously taken alternative transport (e.g., trains).

• People who currently find it difficult or impossible to drive, such as the elderly or some people with disabilities, will have increased access to road transport with the advent of the new systems, resulting in an estimated 2 to 10 percent increase in road energy use for personal travel.

• Possible higher speed limits because of the improved safety of autonomous cars (7 to 22 percent) and demand for heavy extra equipment in driverless cars such as TV screens and computers (0 to 11 percent) might also tend to reduce efficiency savings.

Read more: Help or hindrance? The travel, energy and carbon impacts of highly automated vehicles, Transportation Research, Volume 83, April 2016. Summary: Driverless cars could increase reliance on roads. Via Road.cc. Picture: Google. Previously: Self-driving cars: A coming congestion disaster?

At 3 pm, it goes to the school to bring his daughter home or chauffeur her to after-school activities. Then it’s time for it to drive back into the city to pick up Dad from work. But then, on a lark, Dad decides to go shopping at a downtown department store after work, so he tells his car to just circle the block for an hour while he shops, before finally hailing it to go home.”

Read more: Self-driving cars: a coming congestion disaster.

“The design of automobiles has tended toward insulation, offering an ever less involving driving experience. The animating ideal seems to be that the driver should be a disembodied observer, moving through a world of objects that present themselves as though on a screen. We have throttle by wire, brake by wire, and electrical assist (versus hydraulic assist) brakes, as well as traction control and anti-lock brakes that modulate our driving inputs for us. What all this idiot-proofing and abstraction amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver.”

“What’s more, the information that does get through is presented in a highly mediated way, conveyed by potentiometers and silky smooth servos rather than by the seat of your pants. It is therefore highly discreet, and does not reflect fuzzy, subtle variations. Nor is it sensitive to changes that haven’t been anticipated and coded for ahead of time, for example the vibration that might arise from a brake caliper bracket that has come loose or cracked. Perhaps most troubling, the electronic mode of presentation means that information about the state of the car and of the road is competing with information from other electronic devices that may be a lot more interesting.”

Read more: The Case for Dangerous Roads and Low-Tech Cars, Matthew B. Crawford. Picture credit.

There has been huge growth in the number and complexity of electronics features on passenger vehicles, says Paul Green, a research professor at the University of Michigan. In tracking just one model, the Infiniti G, over a seven-year period, Green found that the total number of pages in this entry-level luxury car’s multiple owner’s manuals grew by an average of 30 a year.

That means the owner of a 2013 Infiniti G has to read the equivalent of a small novel to understand how to operate all the new features added since 2006.

Just as all cars are not alike, technology-averse car shoppers don’t all slip from the same mold. There are, of course, the traditional Luddites: people who believe technology diminishes humanity and want nothing to do with it. But there also are those who’d rather avoid complex technologies because they can’t, or won’t, take the time to learn how to use them.

Some want to avoid technology that they see as increasing distraction because it requires drivers to look at information screens while operating the vehicle. Some are concerned about the trend toward cars with greater connectivity to the Web because of their potential for being hacked. And there are motoring purists who want nothing to come between them and the hands-on driving experience.

How to buy a low-tech car — car shopping tips for technophobes, a practical guide from automotive website Edmunds. Via WSJ.

“Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.”

“What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk? Or would you prefer to live in a world where it doesn’t swerve but keeps you safe?”

Quoted from: Automated Ethics, Tom Chatfield, Aeon Magazine. The image is from Ethical Autonomous Vehicles, a research project and video by Matthieu Cherubini. Three distinct algorithms have been created – each adhering to a specific ethical principle/behaviour set-up – and embedded into driverless virtual cars that are operating in a simulated environment, where they will be confronted with ethical dilemmas. Via InternetActu.

Today’s cars look like spaceships and are built by robots in futuristic factories. At least, that’s the picture in the developed world.

In Ghana, West Africa, both the cars and the auto industry look rather different. In a neighbourhood called Suame Magazine, an estimated 200,000 artisans take apart discarded western cars and use the parts to build easily repairable vehicles that are suitable for African roads. All this happens manually and in open air.

Artist Melle Smets and researcher Joost van Onna, both from the Netherlands, set up shop in Suame Magazine and built a unique African concept car in collaboration with the local community: the SMATI Turtle 1. Their project calls into question western ways of dealing with technology, waste, employment and automation.

Picture: The SMATI Turtle 1

Large cargo ships bring thousands of used cars from Europe to the African markets every week. In Ghana, these vehicles are transported from Tema harbour to Suame Magazine, 10 km north of Kumasi, to get a total makeover. Originating in the 1920s when blacksmiths started to shift their attention from carriages to cars, Suame Magazine now employs an estimated 200,000 artisans in 12,000 enterprises.

It is a self-organizing system capable of building almost anything using car parts; fences, swings, water pumps, carbide compressors, welding machines, but most of all vehicles adapted to the African market. Everything is recycled. Even the unrepairable car parts have a destination: the blast furnace, which melts broken engine blocks into new iron products.

Suame Magazine might look chaotic to Western eyes but all the same it produces cars. Better cars, in a sense. Western automobiles have become so sophisticated that once they break down you cannot repair them yourself.

Stripped to the Bone

In Suame Magazine, first the cars are stripped to the bone. Secondly, all computerized devices are thrown out. A sustainable African car has to be mechanical. When the car is stripped the construction process can begin. The result is a strong and simple car ready to carry heavy loads, with extra cargo space, a mechanical motor, a stronger chassis, stronger rims and iron springs. African roads demand very strong cars. The European cars are too weak.

The SMATI Turtle 1

Melle Smets and Joost van Onna traveled to Kumasi in February 2013 to build an African concept car in collaboration with the local artisanal community. The vehicle, which is called the SMATI Turtle 1, was built according to the motto “Let’s make things simple”, and satisfied the following criteria:

• it was entirely built in Suame Magazine from locally crafted, refurbished and used parts from different brands of discarded cars;
• it is robust and easy to assemble, re-assemble and repair;
• it is a prototype of a car potentially fit for the African market;
• it provides the driver and passengers with a superb experience of the landscape when driven;
• it was built in a time frame of just 12 weeks.

The completed car made a test drive through Ghana, and was inaugurated by the Ashanti king. The SMATI Turtle 1 was then exported to the Netherlands. In this way, discarded car parts which were once exported to Ghana were sent back to where they came from in the shape of a unique automobile. Smets and van Onna have made a website and a video about the SMATI Turtle 1, which was the source material for this post.

The car will be presented at the international IMPAKT festival in Utrecht (the Netherlands) from October 30 to November 3, 2013. This year’s festival theme is “Capitalism Catch 22”. I will be one of the speakers at the IMPAKT festival, so I hope to tell you more about the vehicle in two weeks.

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• Is Cuba the first large-scale maker society?
• When low-tech goes IKEA
• How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware
• More low-tech cars

So you can have more contact with a lot more people, but the quality of your relationships with those people, especially the people who are your immediate neighbors, is diluted. You don’t rely on them as much. It really drastically undermines the community.

The Beachy Amish — that’s a sect within the Amish — they decided to adopt cars. Then most of the young people left the group because they got exposed to the rest of the society and — poof! — they’re gone.”

Read more: Despite horses and buggies, Amish aren’t necessarily ‘low-tech’.

Watch the movie. Previously: Magic Motorways (1939) / London Traffic Improvements (1938) / Roadtown (1910).

Cars as they should be: toys. Metropolis II by Chris Burden.

• Rambler Model “Z” Runabout (1909)
• Ford Models N, R, S and S Roadster (1909)
• Thomas Flyers (1909)

“The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.”

“The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.”

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible.”

“Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems.”

Quoted form “Energy and Equity“, Ivan Illich, 1978. The image was found on the website Old Woodies. Previously: Cars, out of the way. More bicycle posts.

In 1935 Sir Charles Bressey was appointed by Hore-Belisha, Minister of Transport, to make a comprehensive and systematic survey of the roads of Greater London. It was clear that the infrastructure required radical improvement to keep up with the expansion of traffic and Belisha said that Bressey’s report “would stir the imagination of the whole country”.

The report was published three years later and laid out a reconstruction scheme for London based on a detailed 30-year plan for highway development. Bressey’s plan to deal with traffic involved tunnels, overhead roads, new arterial and circular highways and ‘parkways’ linking the city to the rest of the country. Before any of this could be implemented the plan was interrupted by war and aerial bombardment. Nevertheless, many of Bressey’s ideas would influence post-war reconstruction and subsequent schemes for the capital’s reorganisation.

Source (if you’re in a UK school or library, you can access a movie about it).

Via Ptak Science Books, where you can see more illustrations of the “traffic improvements” outlined in the “Bressey Report”. Check out this blog, by the way, there is much more to be found (about 900 posts on the history of ideas and technology, to be precise…). It is written and illustrated by John Ptak, an antiquarian science bookseller.

Related: Magic Motorways, a similar plan for US cities.

More pictures and plans at Sandy’s Can Cars (via Ikkaro). Related: 26 paper models of vintage cars.

Click on the image to view the pictures in high resolution. Source: Mémoires et compte rendu des traveaux de la société des ingénieurs civils, Vol.113, 1924.

Via Treehugger.

“Horseless vehicles, automobiles, motor cycles operated by steam, hydro-carbon, electric and pneumatic motors – a practical guide for automobilists, manufacturers, capitalists, investors and everyone interested in the development, use and care of the automobile” (1901). Including a special chapter on how to build an electric cab, with detail drawings.

In the “Highways and Horizons” pavilion at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York, General Motors presented Americans with “Futurama”, a vision of the city of 1960. Norman Bel Geddes designed an enormous scale model, showing a utopian city rebuilt for the motor age, completely separating cars and pedestrians. Five million people came to see the exhibit, waiting more than an hour for their turn to get a sixteen-minute glimpse at the motorways of the world of tomorrow. There
is a technicolor movie of the show online, as well as the accompanying book that Geddes wrote to explain his (and the motor industry’s) ideas (or propaganda): “Magic Motorways“.

Update: another movie here (via). Related: London traffic improvements (the Bressey Report, 1938).

Source: Popular Science, May 1960

“After 2000 kilometers on woodgas everything worked properly. Top speed is 120 km/h. Cruising speed 100-110 km/h. Fuel consumption approximately 30 kilos of wood for one hundred kilometers, which is also one effective filling of the fuel bin. The back seat loaded with sacks of wood make the total range approximately 400 kilometers.”

Update: “Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank“.