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Monday, December 21, 2015

Private Car Ownership may become a Rarity

In 25 years, the only people owning cars will be hobbyists, hot rodders and Flat Earthers

Henry Ford was a smart guy, but he never did the math when he decided to put every American household on wheels.

A century after the Model T, the world has a problem with cars. The U.S. and China will consume about 40 million light vehicles in 2015, according to IHS. Globally, we’re on track to hit 100 million vehicles in 2020.

That’s not a lot of cars. That’s an ocean of cars, an inundation, wave after wave breaking on the shores of the industrialized world. And yet policy makers and common folk alike have been powerless against the siren song of the automobile. Even in the most car-blighted burg in the world, the toxic parking lot they call Beijing, the appetite for the automobile—as status item, as luxury, as totem of personal mastery in a fragile postcolonial mind-set—is driving millions more into its smoggy embrace, despite limits on ownership and the government’s rising alarm.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

No place to look but at corporation and government leadership.

Believe it or not there is an intelligent way to approach this problem that does not involve the government telling us that we can own cars.

Anonymous said...

Most of us will be dead so it won't matter.

Anonymous said...

I've been hearing this rhetoric for 30 years.
Back in the '70s I remember hearing that the oil would run out by 2000.

The US auto market is about 16,000,000 per year, it may fluctuate a little here and there but the trend is always up

Anonymous said...

"These transactions will move through the glowing bowels of your monthly credit accounts, and you won’t even feel them."

I don't think I've ever hear the term "glowing bowels" before. But this part absolutely cracks me up.