The automobile over the last 100 years went from being a luxury toy to a normal purchase for normal people in just about every culture on earth. Hundreds of millions of people now depend on private motor vehicles. Workers rely on them to commute, parents rely on them to transport children to school and play, and families rely on them to vacation at cottages and beaches. Granted, many of these drivers could use public transportation, but it’s generally slower and less convenient.
The structural dependency of societies on automobiles is not an accident of history. Networks of auto, tire, and construction companies have worked hard to expand roads and obstruct (or even destroy) public transit. Governments have subsidized the use of private vehicles with, for example, free roads and parking space. Manufacturing and advertising firms have associated “owning a car” in the minds of consumers with sex, freedom, speed, adventure, and affluence. One result is cars now move through popular cultures with relatively few institutions or consumers ever questioning the costs and risks of the ecological shadows of automobiles.
Over the last century, the most influential forces changing the environmental impacts of automobiles have been technological advances, government regulations, and corporate positioning. Starting with industrialists like Henry Ford, automakers have competed to produce more cars with less labor, resources, time, and waste. As output rose with less input, cars became cheaper and sales went up.
Ford’s Model T epitomizes this first era of rapid expansion. Putting the Model T on an assembly line, Ford was able to use savings from more efficient manufacturing to lower prices so average American workers could afford the luxury of independent travel. Ford sold his 1908 Model T for $850; thirteen years later, it cost just $260. His production and marketing strategies were so successful that half of the world’s cars were Model Ts by 1920. By the mid-1920s, Ford had sold 10 million Model Ts; another 5 million were sold over the next few years. The 1920s was an era of fast growth in the American car industry, and, by the end of the decade, over 23 million cars were registered in the United States—one for every five Americans, up from one for every thirteen at the beginning of the decade. The next few decades were calmer in terms of growth, until sales again took off after the end of World War II. The number of vehicles in the United States alone was close to 50 million by 1950, approaching 75 million by 1960, and easily surpassing 100 million by 1970, when there was one car on the road for every two Americans.
By the 1960s, with automobile sales now also increasing markedly in Europe and Japan, governments and consumers began to pressure firms to produce new models with better environmental and safety features. Since then, there’s been a steady, though inconsistent, improvement. Today’s average automobile in North America, western Europe, and Japan is now much safer (with features like seat belts, antilock brakes, and air bags) and causes less environmental damage over its life cycle (with features like catalytic converters and fuel injection). The gradual declines in death rates per mile driven in every developed country and the cleaner air in local environments like California are clear evidence of these changes.
The benefits of these changes, however, have been highly unequal, accruing primarily to wealthy consumers in powerful states, and only secondarily to poorer consumers in more polluted environments. More-over, the environmental impact of the global auto industry overall is rising steadily as more and more vehicles enter the roads. The number of passenger cars and commercial vehicles went from a handful at the end of the nineteenth century to well over 800 million today. And the numbers continue to rise.
By the middle of this century, assuming current trends hold, over 2 billion light motor vehicles will clog the world’s roads. Most of this increase will occur in the developing world—places without the infra-structure or government capacity to maintain safe or healthy environments. Consumers will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy and run their cars and trucks. These direct costs, moreover, will be only a fraction of total costs, which also include outlays for roadwork, parking spaces, bridges, traffic cops, state regulation, and environmental cleanups. So many automobiles will also mean dirtier cities in the Third World (even as some cities in the First World become cleaner) and much greater stress on the global environment—adding considerably, for example, to global greenhouse gases. It will mean many more traffic deaths, too. Already the risk of dying is high, with lifetime odds of about 1 percent as a cause of death even in the wealthiest countries. Traffic collisions now kill over 1 million people a year—and injure as many as 50 times that number. Already 85 percent of these deaths are in developing countries, and the future there looks even bleaker. By 2020, the number of annual traffic deaths is expected to exceed 2 million, even though mortality rates are likely to continue to decline in all of the wealthy countries of the world.1
The shadow effects of the auto industry, then, are intensifying for poor people and the global environment, even as new technologies decrease per unit impacts of new vehicles. Rising sales of sport-utility vehicles over the last decade show the dangers of relying on technological advances, corporate interests, and consumer sovereignty to transform the societal and environmental impacts of this industry. Many consumers clearly enjoy the sense of power of these large, easy-to-handle vehicles. Many consumers feel safer, too (even though the statistics on occupant death per SUV on the road are not notably better). Yet the choice to drive an SUV increases the risks of injury or death for pedestrians as well as other drivers and passengers. These vehicles transfer ecological costs to others as well, occupying more space than cars and requiring more resources—such as gasoline and rubber and steel—to operate. They also strain the global environment more than cars, from stirring up desert dust storms to emitting more greenhouse gases. Already they account for nearly half of total vehicle purchases in the United States; and, if global trends continue, half of all motor vehicles worldwide will be SUVs or other light trucks by 2030.
Thus improvements increasing the safety and reducing the ecological impacts of automobiles are occurring too slowly to prevent irreversible harm both to millions of families (especially in developing countries) and to the global environment. In some ways, this outcome is a natural consequence of globalizing economic change itself, which is not primarily about creating better living conditions, but rather about generating more sales and profits. The current philosophy of Toyota—the Toyota Way— is revealing here. The Economist describes it as the “relentless pursuit of excellence.”2 So impressive is Toyota’s record of steadily manufacturing more reliable, safer, and more environmentally friendly cars and trucks with less waste and fewer resources that, for decades, other auto firms have been borrowing Toyota’s ideas—like just-in-time assembly lines— to improve quality and efficiency of production.
Yet this relentless pursuit of excellence has also meant a relentless pursuit of global sales. Toyota is already in the Global Ten—accounting for over 10 percent of annual vehicle production—and, by 2008, was right on the heels of the global leader, General Motors, with the aim of becoming the only auto firm in what it calls, in an effort to motivate workers, the “Global Fifteen.” Toyota’s tactics to increase its market share may differ somewhat from Ford and General Motors during the first half of the twentieth century. But the outcome is basically the same: more structural dependencies—personal, socioeconomic, and political— on more and more automobiles.
Some people are resisting the growing global dependency on the auto-mobile. Citizens have mounted protests—some even successful—to block road construction. Some individuals choose to live without a car as part of a simpler lifestyle; some also choose to “jam” elite cultures with messages about the perils of driving. Others, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), are encouraging more responsible use of automobiles. Some communities like Singapore and London are charging drivers for access to downtown areas to reduce congestion. Others like Canada’s Toronto Islands are banning automobiles outright.3 A hornet’s nest of critics is now attacking the rising numbers of SUVs. One campaign in the United States to encourage Americans to drive less (especially SUVs) is asking: “What would Jesus drive?”4 Another links SUVs to oil imports and thus to funding Middle East terrorists. For all that, resistance is sporadic and fragmented, doing little to slow the rising global consumption of automobiles.
The next case tells the story of fueling the automobile with leaded gasoline. It begins nearly a century ago, with a team of scientists in a DuPont laboratory searching for a way to improve the performance of gasoline.