>Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.<p>Smarts aren't actually that efficient. The small body means that the car has to be very strong, and therefore very heavy in order to withstand collisions. I was looking at a Smart on display, and I was surprised to see that it got poorer mileage than my Hyundai Elantra, despite the fact that my Elantra is about twice as large.
It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29</a>). Using the marketing typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way.<p>Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots</a>)?
When my son was six we were walking around downtown and saw a Smart car and his first impression was that he could pick up the car and turn it over. He thought it was a "dumb."<p>The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.<p>You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.
While the car example is decent enough in explaining how preferences can be absurd, "distant food" is a pretty poor example. It is not driven by customer preferences, but by economics.
I have an oven that's about four feet wide that I hardly ever use for anything larger than a 12 inch cake.<p>And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than one person has to use the bathroom at the same time.<p>I have a mountain bike that I only occasionally take up a mountain.<p>My car can brake in a ridiculously short distance, even though I've only used that feature to save my life once.<p>I wear a seatbelt all the time, even though I've never been in an accident where it would have made a difference.<p>Edge cases matter. A lot. The Smart car covers the "every possible travel condition that a college student can think of" case very well, but it's not versatile enough for most people.
A "smart" car is just another icon of consumerism, like an iPhone, or a "snuggie".<p>If you want to spend money on stuff that is marketed to a self proclaimed "smart" niche audience of people who think that buying cute stuff makes them better or "smarter" for their purchased possessions, fine, do so, but don't expect the public to be enthused about your overconfidence in how much better material things make you and your life.<p>P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind you "too late" at a major intersection.
I was having a discussion with someone about how much of our transportation issues would be solved if we were content traveling at <20mph. Electric vehicles could be much simpler because they didn't have to move at highway speeds. Travel would be significantly safer as well.<p>Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you? Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5 miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside of that 5 mile radius.
Nitrogen in fertilizer is extracted from the air (not from petroleum as stated). The hydrogen can be gotten from electrolysis of water, or from methane.
Those who would like a very small, efficient car that actually has back seats and suchlike, might like to check out the Renault Twingo.<p><a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twingo" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twingo</a><p>Doubt you can get it in the US though.
This can go in line with questioning the status quo: <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-question-the-status-quo-how-do-you-ask-the-right-questions" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-question...</a>
Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light.<p>>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.<p>This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.