Eight big tech car things that never happened

A common complaint levelled against your average man on the street from a first-world country is that he’s lazy. He probably got to that part of the street by driving the half mile from his house, parking in a No Standing zone so he doesn’t have to walk as far to the store to buy milk for his automatic coffee machine, because he can’t put in the effort to use a manual espresso machine.

What. Utter. Cobblers. Just because the graft looks different these days doesn’t mean it’s just as tough. It’s like the difference between a brick and cordovan leather. They’re both relentlessly tough; it’s just that one is rough and outdoorsy and the other does its best work in the boardroom.

And if you ever needed a perfect case-in-point for the non-laziness of modern man, look no further than the complete and utter failure of the Segway. It seems beyond naive in retrospect that anyone really thought it was the future of personal mobility, that the need for walking would be replaced by the desire for labour-saving technology. Seriously, the Segway’s inventors genuinely thought – and publicly claimed – it would revolutionise the way we got around.

As you’re likely already aware, it never took off, selling slowly, making barely any profit and immediately becoming an absolute joke. George Dubya crashed his; a cameraman took out Usain Bolt as he celebrated his 200m win and Kevin James destroyed whatever shred of appeal it had left in Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a movie which never had a shred of appeal to begin with.

Don’t forget, kids, it’s not just the Segway that failed. Remember the Sinclair C5? Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor, entrepreneur and computer wunderkind, started Sinclair Vehicles to parlay his expertise in electronics into electric vehicles, resulting in the C5.  

And, if you consider that Lotus made the C5’s chassis, it weighed just 45kg and it had the backing of the British version of Steve Jobs, there’s every reason to imagine it’d sell like hotcakes. Or iPhones.

But then you see it, and everything makes sense. It looks like the kind of thing futurologists from the Seventies would assume we’d all be shuttling ourselves around in at the turn of the millennium. If we’d all somehow slipped into some kind of Logan’s Run scenario. And, just like making a Logan’s Run reference, the Sinclair C5 was incredibly dorky. And not in that fun dorky way, just the regular cringey kind of way.

Then there’s the small matter of... well, roughly everything else. It had 0.34bhp, which is just enough to completely fail to motivate anything larger than a helium balloon. Which is likely why the C5 was also pedal-powered, making it a battery assisted recumbent bicycle, with styling cues by Johnnycab.   

Sinclair made about 15,000 C5s and sold maybe one in three of them. Yep, just 5,000 Brits were willing to overlook the pocket-protector levels of cool and dismal power and buy one of their own. And, presumably, given the handlebars sit under your knees and control a single wheel at the front, they wobbled their way into the nearest thicket.

Some of the ideas were absolutely brilliant – such as low cost, low weight and low environment impact. But the main idea of a large and ungainly personal mobility device when walking, bicycles, scooters, buses, taxis, hire cars and skateboards already existed? Well, you see how it turned out.

Image: Prioryman

On the face of it, Bose’s active suspension is the perfect antidote to modern roads – imagine swanning over any kind of surface with nary an inkling of just how pockmarked and potholed it might be. That was Amar Bose’s vision, and, frankly, we’d be much happier if this is one of the big tech things that had actually made it.

The heart of the idea is one of active suspension, as opposed to passive. So, instead of suspension reacting to the road surface and dissipating the wheel and body forces exerted by the road surface, it uses road sensors to figure out what each of the four suspension units needs to do in order to achieve (frankly uncanny) body stability, regardless of road surface, steering or braking.

But instead of using humdrum springs and shock absorbers, Bose used – and we’re not even remotely kidding – power amplifiers and linear electromagnetic motors (like those used on maglev trains and railguns) to control each wheel. If it sounds completely nuts to you, feel free to join the club.

And, in case you’ve not already watched the video on repeat, wondering if physics was looking the other way for a second, allow us to clear something up: it works. Brilliantly. Unfortunately, after decades in development, Bose decided its revolutionary suspension was too heavy and too expensive to replace the cheap and ubiquitous spring-and-shock setup that’s underpinned just about every car since the Titanic missed New York by 1100 nautical miles (and 2000 fathoms or so). Maybe Bose didn’t have Rolls-Royce’s number; if ever there was a company unconcerned with weight or price...

The tech itself isn’t dead, by the way – 30 years of skunkworks research, while ultimately a white elephant for Bose, was a boon for ClearMotion, a Massachusetts-based tech company that’s dedicated itself to finding a cheaper, lighter way to achieve founder Amar Bose’s original goal of not being beholden to road surfaces for ride comfort.

So while Bose’s dream of active… um, bump cancellation never made it in its original form, there’s every chance that the basic idea might make it into a car near you in the future. Or another one of these lists.

The danger with making a list called ‘things that never happened’ is the very distinct possibility that it’s more of a ‘thing that hasn’t happened yet’, rather than one that never will. And hey, we’re not great at predicting the future; if we were, we would have jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon back in 2009 and would now be building our own private racetracks on our private islands and keeping Singer Vehicle Design on retainer.

And so we come to fully autonomous cars. And the risk of repeating our complete failure to recognise a game-changing bit of tech twice in a lifetime, we think fully autonomous passenger cars were just a thing that never happened.

Yes, we know – there are cars that can do vast distances without human interference. And not a week goes past without some company with a name that looks like it came out of a random letter generator telling us how our autonomous future is just around the corner, thanks to a couple of self-driving delivery vans, or people-movers press-ganged into service in a nursing home – sorry, retirement community – somewhere.

Before we go any further, let’s get in ahead of the onslaught of “but what about Tesla’s Autopilot?”

And like we said, some cars – including Teslas – can rack up huge miles without the erstwhile driver doing much more than having a singalong to Classic Rock FM or quietly farting into the seat. And at least one of the things in that previous sentence is excellent. But we’re not exactly jumping in our cars, telling them to head for the coast and nodding off, are we?

The problems are manifold – hardware, software, legislation, expense and so on – and that’s worth an entire article on its own. But our big problem with completely autonomous cars – and again, we’re not exactly soothsayers when it comes to this sort of thing – is pretty simple: who the hell wants one? Driving is one of the last great freedoms we’re afforded in the modern age, and we’d be mad as particularly mad brushes to give that up for anything, let alone a computer-controlled trip to work when you’re every bit as capable of driving yourself.

Let’s head back in time. Y’know, way back, before the summit of human optimism was ‘surely, next year can’t suck as much as this one did’. Back in those heady days, there was a dream which was as simple to conceive as it was difficult to achieve: the flying car.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. See, the genesis for a low-cost, high-volume personal flying machine came from none other than Henry Ford back in the 1920s. And if you’re familiar with how the 1910s closed out, you’ll know that optimism wasn’t exactly at its highest crest back then either. Nonetheless, undaunted chaps like Mr Ford, after revolutionising the car from a plaything for the rich to a vessel of personal and social mobility, eyed the possibility of taking that mobility to the skies.

Needless to say, it didn’t... um, take off (forgive us), but the idea has never really gone away in the century since. To this day, it keeps popping up. Companies we’ve never heard of before reveal new designs that will surely succeed where so many have failed, and legacy carmakers from Aston to Porsche are ‘looking into premium personal aerial mobility’, or however the humanoid creatures in marketing departments word things. Hell, aeronautics companies are running down the dream and even NASA is getting in on the idea. Surely, surely, we’ve gotta be close, right? Er, Nope.

As we said back in 2018, “Making flying cars work is a) expensive, b) difficult and c) fraught with legal and safety issues. And these tend to be rather large impediments.

“Helpfully, there’s an analogue for flying cars that’ll help explain the flying car’s current predicament – self-driving cars. They’ve taken years and countless millions of pounds, dollars and euros to bring to an almost market-ready state, but we’re still not getting driven to work by our cars. And, before they do begin chauffeuring us about, there’s a heap of issues to sort out – will we need licences to get in one, or special training to react if something goes wrong? And what happens if they crash? Now, take these concerns and multiply them by an extra eight or so miles of useable airspace above our heads.”

But to find the biggest problem with the flying car, we need to be incredible bores and quote ourselves again. This time, it’s emeritus Top Gearian James May: “If your car can fly, why would you drive it? No one is going to drive around until the traffic gets too bad and then take off out of frustration. If your car flies, you will fly everywhere.”

Hard to put it better than that.

If you think about where the future seemed to lie back in 2011, you’d be forgiven for a) having a much brighter outlook about things than we do in 2022, and b) assuming that cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells would be an absolute shoo-in.

After all, electric car batteries were absolute tosh – charging was something that took about three eons and needed to happen every 10 miles or so. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is the most abundant element in the universe. It’s basically impossible to run out of the stuff here on Earth, too; you can make it from crude oil, ammonia, gas, or – and this is the really cool bit – water. And they’re just the ways we’ve heard of. So a zero-emissions car that runs on fuel you can find anywhere and which gets refilled in the same amount of time as the petrol car you’re used to. And, crucially, can go just as far on a tank. It sounds perfect, doesn’t it? So why didn’t it take off?

Well, a few things. Tesla introduced the Model S in 2012, which charged quickly, went quickly and didn’t look like a rolling apology for owning a car in the first place. Battery tech just kept coming on in leaps and bounds, to the point where a 15-minute charge-to-basically-full scenario is entirely possible on 350kW chargers. And Tesla, again, changed the discussion around electric cars from ‘environmental saviours’ to ‘destroying Lambos in a straight line’ with the Model S, and set forward an entirely new paradigm of electric supercars.

On the other hand, hydrogen production has lagged because there’s no demand, and demand has lagged because there’s no infrastructure, and infrastructure has lagged because there hasn’t been an uptick in either demand or supply. Also, there’s hydrogen’s backstroking bluebottle in the ointment – most hydrogen comes from gas, oil and coal, which are exactly what electric car people are trying to wean themselves off. And building huge solar-powered electrolysis facilities to separate hydrogen from water? Well, that’s expensive, the process isn’t super efficient, and there just happens to already be a full electricity grid that can easily supply charge to all sorts of batteries, from phones to cars. Someone fetch the sad trombone and give it a parp.

Of course, you could point to the Toyota Mirai – which moves from a front-drive, Prius-esque mess of angles and ungainliness to a sleek rear-drive luxury saloon – as proof that hydrogen fuel cell cars are happening. Well, we have a couple of points. Firstly, Mirai means ‘future’ in Japanese, as in not now. That’s not much of a leg to stand on by itself, until you realise that the folks who name cars at Toyota are more accurate than even they wanted to be. As of the end of 2020, only about 11,000 fuel cell cars have been sold. Not 11,000 Mirais – 11,000 fuel cell cars in total. Compare that to the 400,000 plug-in electric cars sold in a single month (November 2020, in case you were curious) and you start to understand just how far in the future the hydrogen fuel cell car feels for those of us who’ve watched it founder for the past decade.

And yeah, the new Mirai is cool, but tell us honestly: are you, or anyone you know, going to get one?

Sir James Dyson achieved the absolute impossible – no, not with his myriad technological innovations that revolutionised his industry. His impossible feat was managing to make people care about vacuum cleaners. Injecting an almost Apple-like air to the humble dustbuster is a stroke of marketing and engineering genius that, rather deservedly, took the world by storm. It’s getting to the point where we’re going to have to change the common-language description for vacuuming from hoovering to dysoning.

So you’d think that Dyson, if anyone, would be in a perfect position to take mass-market electric cars and make them desirable. Tesla used humour and humerus-smashing acceleration to lure a wider customer base than early adopters and the eco-minded. Dyson seemed to be well on its way to doing a Cool Britannia version – a Range Rover EWB-sized (and shaped, to be fair) EV that just happened to have a 600-mile range and the ability to make pate out of your liver.

So what went wrong? Well, Dyson is a private company, so when we say Dyson spent £500 million trying to build an electric car, we mean James Dyson spent £500 million trying to build an electric car. And what he found – even with a company already full of battery engineers, HVAC specialists and product designers – is that making money from cars is hard. The finished Dyson EV would have had to cost £150,000 just to break even.

Getting where you’re going quickly is the goal of roughly everybody – except for those who have to slow things down by thinking of baseball, of course.

So the prospect of a 750mph train is more than enough to pique our interest, even if it involves scaled up versions of those old New York mail tubes that sent post (and a cat a few times, apparently) around Manhattan.

And it’s piqued the interest of more than a few companies, investors, governments and common-or-garden tech bros, as well – as it stands, there are feasibility studies underway for routes through roughly any country you can point to on a map. And yes, for any Americans reading, in America too. A certain Elon Musk has even said that it’d work brilliantly one solar system step over, on the red planet. Which would be a great timesaver if you were going to, say, get your ass to Mars, but only had two... weeks... to explore it while you’re there.

Back here on Earth, with its insistent and persistent reality, Hyperloop is just the latest go-round of an idea called the vactrain that’s kicked around for more than a century. And while the tech that underpins it is intensely cool – find us someone who doesn’t think riding in a maglev train at more than half the speed of sound is awesome – it still has a hint of Rube-Goldberg about it, doesn’t it? Building a completely sealed tube, pumping 90 per cent of the air out of it and sealing passengers in hermetic pods before firing them to their intended destination certainly seems a touch harder than getting on a train that runs at atmospheric pressure.

It’s not like trains that run in regular air pressure are exactly slow, either – the current Shinkansen cruises at 200mph. And it’s not even a maglev train; it runs on (admittedly very well-made) rails. The upcoming maglev version will do 300mph. And look even more like a robotic platypus than the current one, but that’s beside the point.

You know you’re living at a pretty advanced time in human history when the phrase ‘why don’t we just rely on good old aerodynamics?’, but we’re talking about a train that already takes huge chunks out of domestic air travel in its native country. And doesn’t need huge tracts of land carved out for airports’ countless runways, hangars and departure lounges.

Now, consider that a train like the Shinkansen exists, and has operated for more than five decades without a single injury or death due to train accidents, despite carrying more than 10 billion passengers. And now consider that America currently has one high-speed train, running on the northwest seaboard. Australia, being the ‘participation award’ winner in basic infrastructure that it is, has none. It does, on the other hand, have the third most-busy air route in the world (in a normal year, of course), with its Sydney–Melbourne hop beating out even Mumbai–Delhi and Beijing–Shanghai.

And we’re supposed to believe that countries like Australia and America, who have shunned public mass transport at nearly every step, are going to fall over themselves for the same basic concept, just in a vacuum tunnel? And yeah, this might just be part two of ‘things that actually happened after we wrote this article’, but we’re not even planning to hold our breath yet. Y’know, because of the vacuum and stuff.