A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

Cars and the FutureA little over a year ago I explained in Cars and the Future that there were three changes happening in the personal transportation industry simultaneously:Drivetrains were changing from the internal combustion engine to electricCar operation was moving from human-based to computer-based (i.e. self-driving cars)Ownership was shift... See more

For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was; certainly inventors were copying an existing mode of transportation, but why would they draw inspiration only from the horse-and-carriage, and not from the ho... See more

The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles get around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy- and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we f

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