The Peak Oil Crisis: Cars – Redux

I hate to keep coming back to cars, but in the last hundred years they have come to be one of the most significant facets of civilization – yet their future is in doubt.

Here in America they are clearly the fundamental implement of life for most of us. Their manufacture, financing, care and feeding provides employment for millions. They bring us to work, food, entertainment, shopping, education, love, friendship. In short. nearly all of American life is intimately involved in unrestricted access to our cars. This, of course, is why we have some 250 million of them running around our country and some 900 million running around the world.


Cars have been much in the news lately. New ones have not been selling too well in recent months and their manufacturers, at least in the U.S., are bankrupt. For the next few weeks, the companies will live off government handouts until the new President and Congress decide just how to let them die. GM just announced that for the first quarter of 2009 it plans to produce 420,000 vehicles. This is 180,000 fewer vehicles than it planned to produce just two weeks ago and is down 53 percent from the first quarter of 2007. With numbers like these, it is clear that the end is coming soon.

Unless you are employed in the automobile industry or indirectly make a living from the manufacture or sale of motor vehicles, the demise of Detroit-as-we-know-it will probably not make too much difference to our mobility. Our inventory of about 250 million registered passenger vehicles is about 50 million more vehicles than we have licensed drivers. We can obviously stop adding to the fleet, jack up vehicle maintenance a bit, cut annual mileage, and get along for decades without seriously impairing the important aspects of the nation’s mobility.

Falls Church News-Press