When I was a kid, I was fascinated with cars. I used to joke that my first word was cat, which it was, but I meant to say car. I was fascinated every time I saw the hood up on a car. I didn’t understand how the machinery worked, I just knew they were fascinating to me. 

I saw the hood open on my dad‘s car once when I was very young. It was a carbureted car, and I asked him as I pointed to the round air cleaner, “Is that where the record player is?” As I thought the sounds of the car were prerecorded somehow.

I remember middle school science – my teacher got how much some of us wanted interactivity. We did all sorts of experiments and he showed us science that was around us. And one of the things that impacted the rest of my life was when he took apart of simple single piston, two-stroke lawnmower engine. I always wondered how engines worked, and now it finally made sense.

When I was about 13, my mom asked the mechanic who worked on their cars if he would let me shadow him, or work there in some form. Not that I wanted money, I just wanted to see how all this crap went together. I “worked” there for one summer, cycling to the other end of town, and primarily watching, sweeping, and shoveling… but also learning. He was rebuilding a beautiful 911 for a local lawyer, and I was able to help assemble the blueprinted engine. It was an amazing experience, and taught me even more.

The automobile of my youth, of the 1970s and 1980s, was a reasonably complicated contraption. Particularly when you compare it to cars from the 1960s, cars from the 1940s, cars the 1920s, etc.. 

About every 20 years through its existence, the automobile has gone through almost a Moore’s law growth in complexity.

What do I mean? 

In my very early youth every car was carbureted. A simple, but inefficient mechanism for combining fuel and air before they are burned. 

Just as I was starting to understand cars, fuel injection came along… As I left college, cars became computerized. Multiple generations of computers in cars made it so mechanical faults could be more readily diagnosed just by reading events the onboard diagnostic computer threw and logged. Nice for diagnostics, but not great for the home mechanic.

As we sit here in 2023, we face two divergent paths. The reality is that we are going to take both of them.

On the left is the continued evolution of the internal combustion engine, or “ICE” as it often called. 

On the right is the electric automobile. In many senses, a much “simpler “vehicle. At least in the sense that it is four wheels, one or more motors, some type of energy storage, brakes, and a body. (Plus some HVAC shenanigans to keep humans, pets, and batteries at their optimal temperatures.)

In contrast, the internal combustion vehicle is incredibly complex. Four wheels, just like an electric car, but also a fuel tank and fuel system, brakes, complex engine cooling system and HVAC, and an engine… An engine that is exponentially increasing in complexity as it nears the end of its run.

The thing you have to remember about internal combustion vehicles is that for most of their lives, they’ve been horribly inefficient. 

That is to say the amount of energy that is retrieved out of every gallon of fuel has been horribly in efficient for over 100 years. And only as ICE vehicles come to the end of their run do we see this incredible growth in squeezing the last bit of efficiency out of internal combustion. 

In my childhood, it was that simple switch from carburetion to fuel injection. Although turbo charging has been around for a long time, we’ve entered an error where it is mainstream. 

If you look, you’re seeing manufacturers, replace larger displacement “bigger “engines like a V8 with a turbocharged V6, or replacing a V6 with a turbo charged four cylinder. The vehicle I drive, a Volvo V60, is both turbocharged and supercharged, and there are logical reasons for both, which I can explain. 

But my point is that Volvo in particular moved from a broad range of engines, including a four-, five-, and six-cylinder, plus a very weird V8… to one common infrastructure.

Now, all of Volvo vehicles use the same basic template… a four-cylinder engine with a range of tricks (depending on the model) to squeeze more power out and give you horsepower close to what the more complex range of engines offered before. 

The benefits are huge, because Volvo dramatically reduces the complexity in terms of engine range, but the engines themselves have become crazy impressive, complex works of engineering. 

Instead of offering four different engines, it’s one basic formula that works for all of their cars, with specific tweaks Depending on the model on offer.

I bring this up primarily to discuss the fact that auto makers are facing two separate battles in most cases.

First, how do we squeeze the utmost efficiency out of our internal combustion vehicles for the remaining timeframe that they are mainstream, which is really the next 20 years or less .

Second, how do we stretch our platform and start producing successful, desirable, usable, electric vehicles. Electric vehicles today are great city vehicles, but they’re undeniably horrible on the freeway. (Or at least horrible in the sense that they require compromise vs. ICE.)

For example, I drive home to Montana almost once a year, at least. The drive is long, and does not offer a great opportunity for charging. More importantly, it requires “optimizing “your trip around charging stops… Know when you have to pee, and know when you have to charge. With an internal combustion vehicle, there’s so many opportunities for fuel, you never have to think about it.

So as the electric vehicle ascends in popularity, the internal combustion vehicle… gradually begins its descent in popularity. 

That descent is going to take a good chunk of the rest of my life, no matter how much people want electric to become mainstream immediately. 

But I digress, as this isn’t my point.

That simplicity of the electric vehicle that I discussed earlier is really fundamental. When I was a kid, the internal combustion vehicle—as simple as it arguably was versus today’s vehicles—was still more complicated than today’s electrics. Some auto manufacturers refer to the platform that electric car rides on as “skateboard”, since it’s basically four wheels, some number of motors, and an increasingly densely packed set of battery cells.

But at the end of the day, there is nothing user serviceable in an electric car. People complained when Mercedes-Benz introduced a recent model that is effectively sealed up like a battery. 

There’s a hood that you can open to put in washer fluid, as I recall, but there’s no hood as we know it, and there’s nothing an owner can service.

In many respects, the electric car is turning into a sealed appliance.

For someone like me who has been interested in cars for so long, this is a little sad to see. 

Through my life, certain manufacturers have built a brand identity, which is based not just on packaging but on functionality and capabilities. Subaru, for example, has, for almost all my entire life, used horizontally opposed (boxer) engines… as old VW’s did, and the Porsche 911 still does. And Subaru also (almost) always offers all-wheel drive.

With the death of the internal combustion engine, the horizontally opposed part of Subaru’s brand identity dies. 

With the ubiquity of two, or in some cases four motors in a vehicle, all wheel drive also becomes much less… special? 

That is to say, it doesn’t require much work, so almost any car can be all wheel drive, depending on how many motors are designed into it. 

Yes, I’m over simplifying. But my meta-point is the fact that so many manufacturers have an identity that’s built around the engine in a vehicle and the features that it offers, like all wheel drive, rear wheel drive, being a hybrid, etc. 

It’s not hard to imagine the future where the Prius  ceases being a hybridized vehicle as it’s been for its entire life, and it becomes just another electric, just like all the other electric around it.

So at their core, every vehicle becomes effectively a skateboard of one or more motors, and four wheels, under a body of some design that reflects the brand identity of a manufacturer, but then every car is effectively the same. 

From the smallest Honda… to the fanciest, Bentley, electric cars are kind of identical. And once we get to a point where 80+ percent of vehicles are electric? The only thing that differentiates them is the interior and exterior of the car.

As I noted, electrics are more like an appliance. Like your dishwasher, you use it, it works, and when it breaks, you generally call a technician to come fix it instead of trying to repair it yourself.

I see the next 20 to 40 years of the automobile as an interesting opportunity. 

As we face the transition to ubiquitous electrics, I feel like I have to reflect a little bit on what the automobile was, and what it’s becoming. 

Like many things in our lives, the way things look at the sunset of our lives is not the way they looked at the dawn of our lives. And that’s not always a bad thing. But I think human beings innately romanticize the way things were. The pizza of my childhood, that birthday party that grandma and grandpa were able to come to… the raw sound of a carbureted V8 from the 1960s…

It will be interesting to see how auto manufactures create a personality for their electric vehicles. Sometimes I refer to that as a soul, although that’s silly, and a little bit anthropomorphic. But it will be interesting to see how manufacturers differentiate their offerings. I also think we’re very likely to see a bit more of a collapse and homogenization of the classic ICE vehicle manufacturers, and definitely a shakeup of electric vendors as ICE manufacturers figure out how to make the switch.

It’s a curious time… I’m not sure I’d say it’s an interesting time, as I feel like a lot of the personality of automobiles is already gone. 

In the US, at least, everything looks the same; SUVs, crossovers, and a tiny bit of everything else. But almost every “car” looks like two bars of soap glommed together.  

So I guess we have to sit back, wait and watch, and see what happens.