Potholes in the road to the future

Everybody wants cleaner, more economical cars but nobody can agree on what they will look like.

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) – Angry motorists, frightened politicians and three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline are stirring new interest in alternative kinds of vehicular transportation that don’t weigh two-and-a-half tons and get 13 miles to the gallon.

In other words, it’s car of the future time again.

Unfortunately, there is no unanimity on exactly what the future holds. The good news is that this time around, nobody is talking about four-wheeled airplanes flying over congested traffic before landing on the roof of your apartment building. The future looks pretty much like the present, except more resource-constrained.

After that, the crystal ball gets cloudy. To take one obvious example: Environmentalists want small, light-weight cars like the Smart (currently sold in Europe) that use a minimum of natural resources. But safety advocates cringe at the thought of people riding around in tiny metal eggs. They want a car built with plenty of steel and arrayed with airbags and collision-detecting radar systems like the heavyweight Mercedes S-class.

A similar debate divides active vs. passive transit. Proponents of the former tend to promote developments like smart cruise control and lane change collision avoidance that could pave the way for hands-free driving. Just like the pilot of an airplane, a driver could dial the address of his destination into a navigation system and then sit back while the car does the rest.

Fortune