Elon Musk’s
imagination was stimulated a few years ago to create the Tesla roadster, a
groundbreaking all-electric sports car. It’s available for sale at dealers
across the United States
today for a little over $100,000 and about 1,000 people owned one at the time of
this writing. It goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds. Tesla
drivers sit in premium performance seats surrounded by black leather with cream
accents. On demonstration rides, dealers like to suggest that their passenger
turn on the radio just as they punch the accelerator pedal. Under full
acceleration with the g-force bearing down, they can’t lean forward far enough
to touch the radio buttons.
And the Tesla is
far more fuel-efficient than the Toyota Prius, traveling more then 200 miles on
a single, $2.00 charge. It’s about six times as efficient as any comparable
sports car, and generates one-tenth of the pollution even if the electricity is
generated by an old-fashioned coal-fired power plant. If the electricity is
generated by the wind, well, its carbon footprint is virtually nil. The
company’s founder said the Tesla enterprise became profitable during the summer
of 2009. He had raised $300 million in venture capital and had access to $465
million in low-interest loans from the U.S. Department of Energy.
He was preparing
to plow his 2010 efforts into the launch of the Tesla Model S sedan scheduled
to go on sale in 2012 for under $60,000.
After fuel savings, he
estimates the true cost of the sedan at about $35,000.
Elon Musk is no
starry-eyed dreamer. Quite the opposite. He was 28 when he sold his first
company, the publishing-software startup Zip2, for just over $300 million. (Not
including a video game he invented at age 12 and sold for $500.) Then he started
the company that would become PayPal, which he sold to eBay in 2002 for about
$1.5 billion.
Musk thinks fast,
luxurious electric vehicles will revolutionize human transportation. “We’re
going to see things we’d never dreamed of,” he says, like battery-powered cars
with a 1,200-mile range and electric-powered supersonic planes.
Engineers and
tinkerers have already revolutionized the efficiency of our technology, at
least in comparison with a few years ago. The household refrigerators sold in California today use 75
percent less electricity than the models from the 1970s. The National Academy
of Sciences reports that, by 2035, fossil-fueled automobiles could get double
their 2010 fuel mileage without sacrificing power or capacity. NASA is
designing airliners that burn 70 percent less fuel and are 70 percent quieter
than today’s Boeing 737s.
I’ve published
magazines dedicated to collectible machines – -antique tractors, classic
motorcycles, that sort of thing. From the first antique tractor show I
attended, I noticed how much I enjoyed the company of the people who love old
farm machinery. Likewise, the classic motorcycle guys. The people at the
antique tractor shows and classic-motorcycle races are, on the whole, a lot of
fun. They wipe their machines off with clean rags, attending to every detail as
if the apparatuses were favored children. They wander the show grounds with big
smiles on their faces. They tell long, amusing stories about how they found a
priceless old tractor in an abandoned barn or how they tracked down their
motorcycle’s rebuilt carburetor in a mechanic’s shop down in Mexico.
On the whole, the
machine collectors are as joyful as any group of people I’ve ever been around.
They laugh a lot more than environmentalists.
What I’ve
concluded is this: People who love interesting machines love the human
ingenuity that went into them. They love human ingenuity, which helps them love
humanity, which helps them love themselves. Their joy is infectious. They’re
great company.
This is why, I
think, people become involved in these peculiar hobbies that, from a distance,
look a lot like drudgery. They spend their spare time covered in grease,
laboring hard to disassemble and reassemble obsolete machines. If someone tried
to coerce us into repairing a decrepit 40-year-old motorcycle, we might be
difficult to convince. And yet that kind of challenge engages the imaginations
of hundreds of thousands of people who literally can’t wait to roll up their
sleeves and engage with these rusty, greasy mechanical puzzles.
It’s just this
kind of passionate ingenuity we need to create a constructive vision of our
future on earth.
Environmentalists
are better leaders when we can better love human ingenuity. True sustainability
will be crafted by human ingenuity with a keen eye for nature. We will need to
form partnerships with the natural world, to ingeniously utilize its resources
in ways that preserve its natural productivity.
For further optimistic discussion about our future, read Beautiful and Abundant by Bryan Welch and connect with Beautiful and Abundant on Facebook.
