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How about the heavy advancement of car safety, the improved capacity for producing materials that cars use, cars being faster, and cars being cheaper? With most

How about the heavy advancement of car safety, the improved capacity for producing materials that cars use, cars being faster, and cars being cheaper? With most technologies and processes, first you create something and then you improve it and optimize it, each further improvement of the same size has a higher marginal cost. Cars have come a very long way, you wouldn't expect a car to change more in one decade than it did in the previous decade. If you are looking for a really revolutionary fundamental change, then it probably wouldn't be a car anymore, maybe it would be a plane.

001sky 12y ago
"Cars" are constrained massively by a couple things that in fact have not really progressed much since 1970. EG, they are constrained to roads and the interstate was a far more revolutionary change than the catalytic converter, direct injection, or DOHC or whatever. You're basically arguing that fuel efficiency is greater, but fuel scarcity is another topic altogether. It remains the case that petrol is still the fuel of choice--not electric or some other source--becuase of its inherent efficency in terms of energy per unit of mass. So, betweeen the fuel constraint ant the roadway constraint, cars are a fractional better than they were a generation ago...but not a categorical or even significant leap by any stretch. If you read some history of LA and compare the changes from 1920 to 1940 you would have seen a radical shift in the impact of the automobile. Heck, even the impact of the container ship alone is far more interesting at a macro/absolute level. Car safety and fuel efficiency are simply very minor improvements on a fundamentally unchanged basic engineering platform: the two ton, four-wheel ICM constrained to a limited right of way, and a very similar feasible safe-speed constraint. Note, that one better argument here is these are as much legal/social as technological constrainst placed upon the automobile. Many people in the younger genreations would rather see the (at least the personal) automobile dis-associated with its role of primacy in western society. This is more or less feasible depending of course on technology and other elements improving the constraints on urban planning. The lack of the removal of these constrainsts (both technological and economic) is again also a sign that technology has/had plateaued in the area of civil engineering. It may have been improved, but in terms of radical improvement...not so much. Of course, shale gas and hydro-fracking may yet do more than keep the status quo in place...but fundamentally...not much has changed in Californial in the past 40-50 years in terms of day to day getting around.

001sky 12y ago

"Cars" are constrained massively by a couple things that in fact have not really progressed much since 1970. EG, they are constrained to roads and the interstate was a far more revolutionary change than the catalytic converter, direct injection, or DOHC or whatever. You're basically arguing that fuel efficiency is greater, but fuel scarcity is another topic altogether. It remains the case that petrol is still the fuel of choice--not electric or some other source--becuase of its inherent efficency in terms of energy per unit of mass. So, betweeen the fuel constraint ant the roadway constraint, cars are a fractional better than they were a generation ago...but not a categorical or even significant leap by any stretch. If you read some history of LA and compare the changes from 1920 to 1940 you would have seen a radical shift in the impact of the automobile. Heck, even the impact of the container ship alone is far more interesting at a macro/absolute level. Car safety and fuel efficiency are simply very minor improvements on a fundamentally unchanged basic engineering platform: the two ton, four-wheel ICM constrained to a limited right of way, and a very similar feasible safe-speed constraint. Note, that one better argument here is these are as much legal/social as technological constrainst placed upon the automobile. Many people in the younger genreations would rather see the (at least the personal) automobile dis-associated with its role of primacy in western society. This is more or less feasible depending of course on technology and other elements improving the constraints on urban planning. The lack of the removal of these constrainsts (both technological and economic) is again also a sign that technology has/had plateaued in the area of civil engineering. It may have been improved, but in terms of radical improvement...not so much. Of course, shale gas and hydro-fracking may yet do more than keep the status quo in place...but fundamentally...not much has changed in Californial in the past 40-50 years in terms of day to day getting around.