Car Engineers, Don’t Stop Dreaming!

Guest contributor, LILY, goes on a flight of fancy and implores others, especially automotive engineers, to join in.

The article “Cow Tipping, the Urbanites’ Way” has triggered my wild imagination. Let me first set up the back story of my daydream: the pressures of life and cost of living in cities increase in parallel with the advancement of technology. As long as urbanisation keeps happening (matter of fact, it will), the pressures of city life will progressively add up. Limited land space is hiking up property prices, which causes a ripple effect that is increasing the cost of car ownership and maintenance.

According to the UN World Urbanization Prospects 2007, urbanisation has been on an upward trend since 1950 and will continue until 2050. We may say that urbanisation for the developed countries of the west occurred in the 19th century; that was the peak of urbanisation for them due to industrialisation. It still occurs now, but at a slower rate compared to the developing countries.

Looking at the urbanisation profiles of the United States and Afghanistan, Asia, Africa and Latin America below, we can see that urbanisation happens in both developed and developing countries, albeit at different rates.

Automology has posted multiple articles about the exorbitant parking rates in big cities. Based on the graphs above, the available space in cities will only become less and more expensive. If this forecast has increased your stress level today, I do apologise. Let me provide some relief; let’s start having our flight of fancy now with this picture:

Wouldn’t this solve some of the space challenges in cities if we can park our cars as such? It does look ludicrous, but back in 1905 when the Wright brothers invented the plane so that Man could fly like birds, the idea had seemed outrageous to the public.

I beseech the engineers in the car industry, before your auto companies pledge to sell more cars, please solve the space problem first; invent a mechanism to park the car vertically with just the press of a button, and make sure the car standing on its rear or nose is stable and safe.

Mark Twain said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do then by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, dream, discover!”

I’m not an engineer, therefore, I can only dream of situations like the one in the picture, and leave the “explore” and “discover” bits to the genius engineers in the car industry; please, do not let this stop at my dream, because you might regret not attempting this “twenty years from now”!

image: thisiscolossal.com, cloudcardealersoftware.com