Over thirty years ago, the movie Back to the Future installed an idea in the collective memory of an entire generation of a reality that in 1985 seemed like the distant future. I have to admit that I, millennial that I am, get excited when I see some of those amazing inventions come to life: the “hoverboard”, the video call, television on demand, clothes that dry by themselves and, more recently, holograms that are practically indistinguishable from true reality.
But the car…well, that’s another story. Today, almost three years after having left that “distant future” in the past, a time-traveling vehicle is still impossible. Almost everyone remembers the DeLorean that Doc Brown returns from the future with was a flying car, but what truly impressed me the most was that it ran on garbage. A car that wasn’t an expense and helped the environment!
Almost halfway through 2018 and cars still don’t fly and continue to pollute the air. However, the car of the future is increasingly becoming a reality. Not one that flies or runs on garbage, of course, but one that requires little or no fuel to get around.
The electric vehicle industry has advanced by leaps and bounds since the Prius was launched in 1997 and revolutionized the hybrid domestic car market. Today there are cars on the market that run entirely on electricity and can be charged on the street or even in a personal garage, and roughly two million electric vehicles are already found on streets around the world, with major manufacturers calculating that they will be producing over a million electric cars every year by 2025.