To my mind, cars in general are moving in the wrong direction (see what I did there?). They have too much content and too many electro-baubles causing too much distraction from the job at hand. Also, the quest for survivability with 5,000,000,000 airbags and a tank-like superstructure means a drain on natural resources and an overly large carbon footprint. With more and more Chinese people adopting a middle-class lifestyle, we cannot keep going the way we are currently without bankrupting the environment or causing conflict over some of the rare earth metals ( and even some of the more common materials) required in a future car.
Do cars really need 120-pound seats with seven electric motors and sixteen-way memory? What about a simpler supportive 25-pound seat like my old SAAB 99 or 900? I could sit in those things for days. Do we need wi-fi in the car? Shouldn't we be paying attention to the road? There is currently about five miles of copper wiring in some cars. It takes about 170 tons of ore to produce one pound of copper. Extraction and even recycling take huge amounts of carbon in one form or another.
To my mind, cars have to get smaller. They have to have less content in order to be viable in a changing world. We're bending the laws of physics by asking automotive structures to keep us safe in spite of ever-increasing amounts of non-structural weight. Fuel mileage is just one piece of the resource puzzle. You can't crow about the fuel mileage in, say, a hybrid without realizing the car weighs 400 pounds more than a comparable vehicle and that content didn't fall out of the sky.
I just keep looking at a lot of new cars and wondering when the whole industry collapses on itself as time goes on.
