As the world’s car industry leaders head to the gargantuan Detroit annual motor show this week, many of them will be in the most upbeat mood for years. Sales are back, the car companies are all making profits. But having weathered the worst recession in living memory a big black cloud still hangs above – young people aren’t buying.
Car and youth culture synched gears decisively in 1955. That was when James Dean played chicken in a black Ford Super De Luxe in Rebel Without a Cause. But more recently the love affair between youth and wheels seems to have broken.
New car purchases by those aged 18-34 dropped by 30% in the US between 2007 and 2012, according to the car shopping website Edmunds.com. Many American under-35s are now not even getting their licence. Given that so called “millennials” – those born between 1983 and 2000 – are now the largest generation in the US, the trend is worrying car firms.
Meanwhile the number of miles driven by Americans each year has also started to drop –they now drive fewer miles per capita than at the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, according to a report released last year by US PIRG Education Fund. And the age group showing the biggest decline? Those aged 16 to 34, who drove 23% fewer miles on average in 2009 than in 2001.
Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century
There are now over one billion cars traveling roads around the world directly and indirectly costing trillions of dollars in material resources, time and noxious emissions. Imagine all these cars running cleanly for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel each.
Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.
Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.
Stuck: Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States
In 1865, Horace Greeley said “go west, young man,” and, for a century and a half, men and women, young and old, were keen to listen. Even into the early 2000s, the sunbelt stretching into the suburban southwest fattened with new housing developments—ultimately, to disastrous effect. But in the last decade, the ambition to go west has been replaced with a lazier notion—to “stay put.”
“Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages,” Tim Noah wrote in Washington Monthly. “Rather, it’s the reverse.” Why America lost her wanderlust is not entirely clear—perhaps dual-earner households make long moves less likely; perhaps the Great Recession pinned underwater homeowners on their plots—but those still wandering aren’t going to the right cities.
When Greeley suggested a westward move, he wasn’t making an argument for sun and gold. He was, above all, suggesting that young people escape from areas with expensive housing:
On the trail of Fred Harvey, tamer of the Wild West
Driving from New York to Kansas City with Harvey has not only been fun and a visual feast, it’s also been an education in his family’s illustrious history, in which the El Tovar Hotel featured prominently. Situated a few steps from the edge of the Grand Canyon, it is probably the shiniest and most famous jewel in the crown, or rather string, of hotels, restaurants and shops established by Fred Harvey, Steve’s great-great grandfather.
Frederick Henry Harvey was born in England in 1835 and became a naturalised American soon after landing on Ellis Island at the age of 17. Intelligent, capable and possessing a furious work ethic, he started out as a simple “pot walloper” (dishwasher) in a New York restaurant and grew to preside over a mighty hospitality empire, revolutionising the way Americans travelled, ate and went sightseeing. He became known as the “civiliser” of an, at the time, extremely uncivilised and very wild west. Harvey developed the first restaurant chain, the first “fast food” outlets (although he used only the freshest, choicest ingredients – as opposed to the highly processed cuisine we associate with the phrase today), the first tourism industry in the American southwest, the first all-female workforce and the first company merchandise and postcards. He also organised the first guided tours into “ethnic” (native American) territories in the southwest.
His empire stretched over 80 cities and towns in 17 states and, by 1948, 47 years after his death, the name Fred Harvey (his signature was the company logo) was attached to some 200 establishments, 29 of which were hotels. He drove a wedge of starched tablecloths, folded napkins and polished silverware into the rough-andready world in which cowboys and Indians were shooting it up and in which baked beans and rock-hard bread were considered a gourmet meal.
Today, however, Fred Harvey is no longer a household name, except among the people who live along the railroad routes he was instrumental in transforming, Hollywood musical buffs and the group of Harveyana enthusiasts who call themselves Fredheads.
It is the latter, as well as assorted members of the Harvey clan itself, that Steve and I are dashing to meet.
Eiji Toyoda: “We learned it at the Rouge”
At a welcoming banquet in Japan in the 1980s, Ford Motor chairman Philip Caldwell received a memorably double-edged compliment. “There is no secret about how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell,” said the head of Toyota Motor, Eiji Toyoda. “We learned it at the Rouge.”
Toyoda was referring to Ford’s fabled River Rouge production complex in Dearborn, Michigan. In the early days of Japan’s rise, Ford and other American auto companies had been famously helpful to information-gathering Japanese engineers. Know-how gleaned at the Rouge evidently proved particularly valuable.
Similar stories can be told about the complacency of other U.S. industries in the face of emerging Japanese competition. Where Japanese industrial “targeting” is concerned, America never seems to learn.
Big Data + Big Pharma = Big Money
Need another reminder of how much drugmakers spend to discover what doctors are prescribing? Look no further than new documents from the leading keeper of such data.
IMS Health Holdings Inc. says it pulled in nearly $2 billion in the first nine months of 2013, much of it from sweeping up data from pharmacies and selling it to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The firm’s revenues in 2012 reached $2.4 billion, about 60 percent of it from selling such information.
The numbers became public because IMS, currently in private hands, recently filed to make a public stock offering. The company’s prospectus gives fresh insight into the huge dollars – and huge volumes of data – flowing through a little-watched industry.
IMS and its competitors are known as prescription drug information intermediaries. Drug company sales representatives, using data these companies supply, can know before entering a doctor’s office if he or she favors their products or those of a competitor. The industry is controversial, with some doctors and patient groups saying it threatens the privacy of private medical information.
The data maintained by the industry is huge. IMS, based in Danbury, Conn., says its collection includes “over 85 percent of the world’s prescriptions by sales revenue,” as well as comprehensive, anonymous medical records for 400 million patients.
CES 2014: Audi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-Driving Cars
Hands free: The Audi Sport Quattro Laserlight concept car features compact sensor and computing technology that lets the car pilot itself.
Carmaker Audi showed off a book-sized circuit board capable of driving a car on Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Audi claims the computer, called zFAS, represents a significant advance in automation technology because it is compact enough to fit into existing vehicles without compromising design.
Several different Audi vehicles equipped with zFAS drove themselves onto the stage during the presentation, and a new concept car designed to showcase it was also introduced.
The car, called the Audi Sport Quattro Laserlight, is capable of what Ulrich calls “piloted driving” but betrays no outward sign of being different from a conventional vehicle.
Tom Wolfe’s California In the Golden State, the great writer first chronicled the social changes that would transform America
And without Wolfe, we would not understand California—or the California-ized modern world. At the time of his most frequent visits, the state was undergoing a profound change, one that affects it to this day and whose every aspect has been exported throughout the country and the globe. Both have become much more like California over the last 40 years, even as California has drifted away from its old self, and Wolfe has chronicled and explained it all.
It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom car show—phoned it in, by his own admission—but he knew there was more to the story. Temporarily without an income, he pitched a story about the custom car scene to Esquire. “Really, I needed to make some money,” Wolfe tells me. “You could draw a per diem from the newspaper writers’ guild, but it was a pittance. I was in bad shape,” he chuckles. Esquire bit and sent the 32-year-old on his first visit to the West—to Southern California, epicenter of the subculture.
US senators push for Fannie and Freddie wind-down
US senators Bob Corker and Mark Warner on Wednesday made another push for their legislation to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying the opportunity to resolve the ownership of the mortgage finance agencies bailed out during the financial crisis should not be squandered.
Their statements at a Financial Services Roundtable discussion on housing finance reform come as the Senate gears up to present a revised plan on Fannie and Freddie, which is aimed at pleasing both Republicans and Democrats.
The Senate banking committee’s leading Democrat and Republican, Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo, are in the advanced stages of putting together a compromise bill that borrows some aspects of the Corker-Warner legislation.
The debate over what to do with Fannie and Freddie had a new twist after Bruce Berkowitz’s Fairholme Funds in November proposed taking over operations of the bulk of the mortgage finance companies.
Mr Corker, a Republican, on Wednesday reiterated that the Fairholme plan proved there was an appetite for risk from the private sector, an issue that drew scepticism from critics of the Corker-Warner bill. White House officials have rejected the hedge fund proposal.
Carmakers keep data on drivers’ locations
A government report finds that major automakers are keeping information about where drivers have been — collected from onboard navigation systems — for varying lengths of time. Owners of those cars can’t demand that the information be destroyed. And, says the U.S. senator requesting the investigation, that raises questions about driver privacy.
The Government Accountability Office in a report released Monday found major automakers have differing policies about how much data they collect and how long they keep it.
Automakers collect location data in order to provide drivers with real-time traffic information, to help find the nearest gas station or restaurant, and to provide emergency roadside assistance and stolen vehicle tracking. But, the report found, “If companies retained data, they did not allow consumers to request that their data be deleted, which is a recommended practice.”
The report reviewed practices of Detroit’s Big Three automakers, Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. It also looked at navigation system makers Garmin and TomTom and app developers Google Maps and Telenav. The report, which didn’t identify the specific policies of individual companies, found automakers had taken steps to protect privacy and were not selling personal data of owners, but said drivers are not aware of all risks.
The agency said privacy advocates worry location data could be used to market to individuals and to “track where consumers are, which can in turn be used to steal their identity, stalk them or monitor them without their knowledge. In addition, location data can be used to infer other sensitive information about individuals such as their religious affiliation or political activities.”