In this week's issue of The New Yorker magazine, writer Elizabeth Kolbert outlines why the car of the future has not arrived. ("Running On Fumes" - Does the car of the future have a future?")

Kolbert documents what many have feared: that two commissions ("projects") between the U.S. Government's Executive Branch, one in the Clinton Administration and one in the current Bush Administration, and automakers General Motors (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F), and Chrysler, that were supposed to design a high-mileage, next-generation car have, in fact, done very little.
The article then provides two critical perspectives on where auto technology is headed from here: one optimistic, ("the techno-optimists") and one pessimistic ("the eco-pessimists"). Kolbert summarizes the fundamental points of each side succinctly, so the article is worth a read on that count alone, but the real point-to-ponder in the article is the utter inability ---through commission or perhaps omission --- of the Big Three to provide American auto buyers (and now global auto buyers) will more-efficient cars than are on the market today.

The article does not present enough evidence to incontrovertibly conclude whether it was flip-flopping (the first commission's goal was a diesel/electric supercar, the second's, a pure hydrogen fuel cell car ) or calculated neglect, but the result has been the same: there's been little progress increasing U.S. auto fleet miles per gallon in more than a generation, and virtually none in the past 10 years.

What's even more disconcerting, Kolbert outlines, is that, Japan's and other engineers' tech advances aside, the U.S.'s ineffectualness is the world's building, potential environmental and energy crisis. Unless, she notes, one argues that citizens in developing countries shouldn't buy cars, today's auto technology points to at least a massive increase in annual global oil consumption. Further, if China and India continue to add consumers with disposable income at current rates, global oil consumption, currently 86 million barrels per day, could double.

Energy/Auto Analysis: As the article points out, it's hard to envision a scenario in which global oil producers double production. It's even harder to envision the added CO2 emissions not having an impact on climate change, which only underscores a much larger point: that U.S. technology and auto innovation implementation delays have shortened the time that auto-based nations have to develop a next-generation car.