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As the Earth Summit was getting into gear last month in Rio de Janeiro, around 600 of the world’s car researchers were meeting in Florence to discuss the future of motor transport. But what emerged from the International Symposium on Automotive Technology and Automation was a confused view of tomorrow’s car. Should the motor industry discard the internal combustion engine once and for all, or keep the engine but change the fuel? Some delegates proposed abandoning the car altogether; others that the industry should continue with business as usual.

Those who questioned whether the car had a future – participants from the US and Scandinavia in the main – did so with such fervour that Terry Morgan, marketing director for Land Rover, was prompted to comment: ‘I thought for a moment I had gone to the wrong conference.’ For another participant, the car’s future was entirely a question of politics. He argued that the goal should be for everyone to have absolute freedom to drive wherever they want.

California’s tough emission laws remain the most immediate challenge to the car. They already ensure that new cars in the state emit about one-tenth of the main pollutants – carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen – that they did in the 1960s. As a result of the standards introduced during the 1970s, catalytic converters and electronic fuel injection systems have become common. Catalytic converters remove pollutants from exhaust gases before they leave the car and electronic fuel injection reduces the volume of pollutants by making combustion more efficient. Europe and the rest of the US followed suit. Now most new cars in the Western world must have catalytic converters.

Yet California’s smog problem persists. The state’s Air Resources Board, which monitors pollution, says Los Angeles failed to meet California’s air quality guidelines on more than 200 days in 1990. Furthermore, most of the state fails to meet the guidelines on at least one day a month. Although today’s vehicles are cleaner than those of the 1960s, the gain has been offset by the growth in population and in the number of cars on the road. ‘We are running hard to stop going backwards,’ said Robert Zweig, a doctor from Los Angeles who attended the Florence meeting.

California’s Clean Air Act of 1988 aims to reduce emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and ‘reactive organic gases’, which include hydrocarbons and other precursors of smog, by 5 per cent every year. The immediate emphasis is on cleaning up petrol. Earlier this year ‘reformulated gasoline’, which does not evaporate as much, became available. In November the petrol companies will have to add oxidising agents to petrol to cut carbon monoxide emissions; the gas will instead be converted to carbon dioxide before it is emitted. Although carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it is not as toxic at ground level as carbon monoxide. Next year the state introduces tighter limits on diesel fuel and, in 1996, ‘phase 2 reformulated gasoline’, which will produce less benzene in the exhaust gases.

California is also demanding four new categories of low emission cars from the motor industry. By 1994, transitional low emission vehicles (TLEVs), which emit half the reactive organic gases of the conventional car, must be on sale. Low emission vehicles (LEVs) vehicles and ultra-low emission vehicles (ULEVs) will have to be on the market in 1997, emitting respectively one quarter and one eighth of the reactive organic gases produced by conventional cars. The first zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) have to be on the market in 1998. In the foreseeable future, only electric cars will be able to meet the zero emission standard and, by 2003, one in ten cars are expected to be electric-powered, says the industry. Electric cars, however, could simply shift the pollution from the road to the local fossil-fuelled power station.

Jim Boyd, the chief executive officer of California’s Air Resources Board, argues that legislation forces the industry to respond positively. The first ‘transitional’ car was approved by the state in April. This was the 1993 model Ford Escort. General Motors is expected to introduce its electric Impact model in 1995. The low and ultra-low emission vehicles are likely to be either hybrid cars, powered by both a battery and an internal combustion engine, or they could rely on a relatively clean alternative fuel, such as ethyl alcohol, propane or natural gas.

Electric vehicles may help to clean up the city streets but they are far more limited in range and speed than conventional cars. And recharging batteries will always take a lot longer than filling up a car with a tank of petrol. Several firms are trying to develop a high energy-density battery, for example Chloride in Britain plans to produce sodium-sulphur batteries. However, most of the early electric vehicles, including General Motors’ Impact model, will be powered by conventional lead-acid batteries – the same technology that powered electric cars when they were last in vogue in the 1920s.

Cars also need to reduce their contribution to global warming. According to Lawrence Michaelis, a researcher at the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell, air conditioning has more effect on global warming than emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. In the US, eight out of ten new cars have air conditioning. In Florence, he said replacing CFCs in air conditioning units with other refrigerants would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases from cars by a factor of three.

In Europe, emissions of carbon dioxide by cars account for up to a quarter of all emissions. Switching to alternative fuels, such as ethyl alcohol, would reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, says Michaelis. However, he notes, Britain does not have enough agricultural land to produce all the ethyl alcohol needed to fuel the country’s cars.

Mike Walsh, an independent consultant who was director of the office of mobile sources at the US Environmental Protection Agency, pointed out that economics encourages people to drive. While fuel prices have halved over the past 15 years, fuel efficiency has doubled. ‘The result is that the price per mile has gone down a lot and people drive more.’

The growth in the number of vehicles is so great that the most realistic way of reducing pollution is by curbing car use, particularly in urban areas. But the political implications of restricting car use are considerable. Boyd said: ‘In California the automobile has replaced the six gun as the one liberty the government wasn’t going to take away.’ He said that attempts in the early 1980s to restrict car use failed. But, he added, California’s Air Resources Board is making a fresh attempt at reducing the number of vehicles on urban highways.

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GUIDED BY THE LIGHTS

The biggest growth area in research is in applying modern microelectronics to cars, mostly in the form of improved information systems to ease the task of driving.

Honda, Nissan and Suzuki in Japan are all developing navigation systems, while General Motors in the US is actually testing a system on a fleet of 100 cars in Orlando, Florida. The European Community is heavily backing research on information technology through its DRIVE programme (Dedicated Road Infrastructure for Vehicle Safety in Europe).

Mike Bell, deputy director of the transport operations research group at the University of Newcastle, who advises the European Commission on the application of information technology to transport, forecasts the spread of ‘dynamic route guidance’ to steer vehicles around traffic jams.

When a vehicle communicates with roadside beacons to update its directions, a central computer linked to the beacons monitors the car’s progress. If the journey takes longer than it should then the computer deduces that a traffic jam is building up. It can then direct other vehicles away from the jam, and thus help to prevent congestion spreading.

The next step is to feed this information on traffic jams to computer-controlled traffic lights. At present, such traffic lights usually rely on detectors buried in the road to let them know how long the queues are before them; they then try to reduce the queue.

The aim now, says Bell, is to have route guidance systems working in tandem with computer-controlled traffic lights.