Today sees the first in a 5-part series that will try to answer those questions. Future articles will examine Urban Mobility, from smart cities to electric scooters; Aviation, from electric jets to supersonic spaceflight; shipping and rail moving the world’s goods and tourists; and finish with the most extravagant plans, from Hyperloop to – yes – the flying car. Some 60 years after the Jetsons, will that ever be more than a cartoon dream?
Today, however, we start with the automobile – more than any other, the vehicle which has shaped our world.
What’s the situation today and who are the world’s biggest establishment players?
At the start of this century, carmaking was still dominated by the combustion engine. Some 41,299,068 passenger cars were made that year, a quarter of them in America. Half of those – some 5.2m – were produced by General Motors. Ford, Toyota and VW were the other big players, all clocking in with more than four million cars.
In the year 2000, Toyota’s market cap was almost $300bn (£225bn). GM’s shares hit an all time high of $94, giving it a market cap of $56bn. Today GM shares stand at $25, and at $36.7bn the company has lost a third of its value. In 2000, America’s bestselling car was the Ford Taurus, a sedan with a V6 engine, was . It would be another decade before electric vehicles hit the road.