The auto industry puzzles me. Over the last 3-4 decades, cars have remained relatively the same. You could take someone from 50 years ago, teleport them to the present day, show him a car, and he would probably say, “Yep, that’s a car.” Sure, cars have fancy gadgets like MP3 players, GPS navigation, and electronic dashboards. I’ll even give the industry credit for adding useful things like anti-lock brakes and catalytic converters. But in the big picture, cars haven’t changed. I recently saw this news article titled Six New Technologies Will Help Manufacturers Reach the 35 MPG Goal (Without Hybrids). This caught my attention a little bit because I in fact already have that technology. It’s called a 1996 Honda Civic. My car is over 10 years old and it gets better gas mileage than most cars available today and apparently better than most future cars not yet made. Now I’ll admit that a Civic is considered a small economy car, but it is 12 years old. Let’s compare this to the computer industry.
Take someone from 50 years ago who worked on a computer that looked like this. If you showed that person a modern-day computer, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. 12 years ago, I was rocking a Pentium II ~200 MHz machine. Since computing power doubles roughly every 1.5-2 years, we have computers that are exponentially more powerful and exponentially smaller. A computer from 12 years ago is no match for even an iPhone from today. So why is it that my car from 12 years ago is more efficient than most cars available today? I’m no car freak, so someone’s bound to tell me about all this other junk that’s available in cars these days, but my day-to-day use with cars has not changed my entire life. Why is that?
