Goodbye Gas Powered Cars

None of us likes change, but change doesn’t care what we don’t like, it keeps happening anyway. There once was a time when we all walked everywhere. Then someone got the creative idea of riding horses instead of eating them. How about hooking a cart to horses? Horsepower!

How about I can show off my status by having fancier carts and horses? We humans have enjoyed showing off our status since Neolithic men traded for obsidian, perhaps 40,000 years ago. “Look, I’m not not using flint, I’m using obsidian knives.” Obsidian is a sharp volcanic glass that is still used in surgical instruments.

Most of us have lived in the automobile/oil age and think this is normal and will never change. We have oil companies, gas stations, car dealers and mechanics. What happened to horse dealers, livery stables and harness makers? How could this ever change? Yet change is inevitable (except from vending machines.) Oil was once considered pretty useless. It was sometimes used as an ointment to put on sores. Rockefeller jumped on the oil refining business when others discovered it could replace whale oil for lamps.

The timing was right. Whalers had killed off most of the whales by this time. What happened to the whalers, ship builders and harpoon makers? Now technology, which is always hurtling forward, building on past technology, has come up with electric cars. It started slowly-just like horse riding and oil-powered cars. New, better storage batteries now make electric cars inevitable. Let’s be honest. Most people won’t switch because they want to save the environment. Most people will switch when the price is right-and that day is fast approaching.

What will happen to the oil men, the internal combustion mechanics, the gas stations? Same thing that happened before. Adapt or die, warns the T Rex. Some folks will keep oil cars as a hobby, just like some people keep horses as a hobby. Some folks will want to pay more for high-status electric cars. Because humans don’t change, not basically, but technology marches on.

Amusingly, because we don’t want EVERYTHING to change, we still describe electric cars in “horsepower.”