“Renew Economy is a site that describes itself as “tracking the next industrial revolution”. Yet, the more I read, the more I think that they’re not tracking anything – they’re pushing something.”
I was perusing the web this morning at my desk when I came across a story in Renew Economy titled “Death Spiral for Cars. By 2030, You Probably Won’t Own One”. As you can bet, it made my eyes pop. The story covers a new report by the technology disruption think tank, RethinkX. The article claims that a whopping 95% of the road traveled will be clocked by self-driving electric vehicles by 2030. In other words, society will be virtually unrecognizable merely thirteen years from now. How’s that for a bold prediction?
As a young guy with probably another two decades of working the streets as a cop ahead of me, my imagination ran wild. Will police still get to drive their own cars? Visions of getting shuttled around from call to call in my black and white electric cruiser filled in my head. Would being the driver in a high-speed pursuit today become simply tagging along for the ride while my automated driver GPS tracks and follows the suspect vehicle? Of course, perps who know what they’re doing will be able to hack their vehicles – and mine too – in order to make their getaway, right? I shouldn’t have dropped Intro to Computer Programming in college. Will I be ready for all this? Never mind. Back to reality. What exactly are we talking about here?
In this prospective brave new world, both the automobile and oil industries will have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Instead of owning and operating a car with an internal combustion engine, fully electric drivetrain, or hybrid system, the vast majority of vehicles will be one hundred percent electric and drive themselves while you hitch a ride in the passenger seat. But that’s not all. The ownership driven (auto industry) will be usurped by what they are calling an on-demand Transportation as a Service (TAAS) industry where almost no one will own their own vehicle. It’s a fancier way of saying pay-per-ride. Think Uber on steroids, but the government subsidizes much of the cost.
Here’s a question. Do you like having the freedom of being able to grab your keys and hop in your car at 2:00am to go wherever the open road takes you? Maybe, maybe not – but it’s a free country, and you’re an American. You don’t need permission to come and go as you please, so why would you so readily give up your freedom of movement just a little over a decade from now? This proposition may be fine for many city dwellers content with renting over owning and convenience over independence, but the same can’t be said for the rest of us living outside of urban centers. Nevertheless, RethinkX muses that this new technology will be so universally advantageous, so undeniably life improving, and so cost and time efficient that we’ll all get on board to order up a ride – but do they really believe that?
Let’s go back to the source. Renew Economy is a site that describes itself as “tracking the next industrial revolution”. Yet, the more I read, the more I think that they’re not tracking anything – they’re pushing something. The article cheerleads rather than explains. It heralds the pros of “less pollution, congestion, and parking problems” but neglects to mention the cons of big brother-esque government intrusion and Orwellian social control practices. Essentially, it’s a lengthy advertisement for Google, Uber, and other major players in the autonomous vehicle industry vying for dominance.
Consider what Uber is doing beyond getting you a ride home from the bar. They’re more interested in social engineering than providing a better transportation service. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick talks about driving the Uber price down to the point where it no longer makes sense to own a car. He’s been explicit about having the goal of replacing cars altogether for a few years now. This vision doesn’t start and end in cities either. While Uber already covers over 75% of the United States, it’s got another stated goal of expanding its final frontier – rural and small town America. Connect the dots. There are some pretty glaring similarities between the future Renew Economy paints and the one Kalanick and others are working towards. Trump is a Russian stooge you say? I’ve got one. Renew Economy is an Uber mouthpiece.
The article goes as far as comparing the replacement of personally owned cars with autonomous EV tech and ride-sharing to the printing press being replaced by the internet. This is pure intellectual dishonesty. When the internet hit critical mass, it gave people unprecedented connectivity and immeasurably increased exposure to new ideas. They no longer had to be told what was happening in their community and around the world by a single newspaper or by the limited number of books they could get their hands on. The net made acquiring research materials for the pursuit of knowledge just a click away, forever saving us from the tedious and time consuming process of going to a library to labor through the Dewey Decimal System. When mobile technology caught up enough to take advantage of the true potential of the internet, it essentially gave us all access to the vast sum of human knowledge in the palm of our hand. At the end of the day, the internet empowered people by giving them exponentially more options. There’s nothing empowering about making government subsidized autonomous taxi rides the only option people can have for transportation. The two warrant no comparison at all.
According to Renew Economy commenters in love with the siren song of a utopian driverless society, I’m ignorant for not believing the prediction will come to fruition by 2030. Of course, people like ‘Bill Nye the Social Justice Warrior Guy’ say they’re open to manmade climate change skeptics like me being thrown in jail. This is where they lose me. It’s not enough to recycle and refrain from littering, carpool when you can, or maybe buy a hybrid. No, you must also be a sycophantic cheerleader of a future where you no longer have a personal liberty – but at least mother nature will be pleased. So much societal transformation is being pushed by the creation of a religion-like industry that relies on getting us to believe we must go along with it or face impending doom. In this case, it’s “give up your car so the earth doesn’t die”. If I’m a loon for considering that the report, and the sites enthusiastically disseminating it, may be part of an effort to solidify the climate change industrial complex that has swept the globe in the time of the millennials, then so be it.
This is strictly anecdotal, but it may be the best way to explain why I think we are much further away from these predictions coming to fruition than 2030. The person who wrote the words you’ve just read about refusing to conform like a sheep on a conveyor belt, and about rebelling against corporate and government attempts to stymie your personal freedoms, is a cop, an authority, “the man” himself. Not only that, I don’t drive a fuel guzzling SUV or truck. I drive a Chevy Volt. I’m not in a hybrid because I think it makes me a better person than you. I’m no member of that cult of virtue signaling Jill Stein acolytes looking down on you for pushing your Silverado. I own it because I find it to be cheaper on gas and I like the way it looks and drives. Still, if a hybrid car driving cop like me is fiercely skeptical about initiatives such as this, how many more people like me are out there that will stand up resist?
