These vehicle fairy tales will never come true

The manufacturers and political bigwigs have come up with two new fairy tales for us to try to digest.

First fairy tale is the great future for self-driving cars. Driving is a large piece of our culture and has been for some 100 years. Polls tell us that U.S. citizens consider being locked behind bars the only thing worse than being deprived of the right to drive a vehicle.

With the possible exception of the relatively few drivers who find themselves in daily rush-hour gridlock, no one else is going to give up the right and desire to drive a vehicle at will.

Second fairy tale is about electric cars. At this point, it takes only a few above-temperature days to set the electric power grid on its ear. Yet we are told we need to have thousands of new vehicles sucking power from the grid.

Increase the capacity of the grid — really? And who is going to pay for the huge required increase? Just how is this power going to be generated? Coal, atomic, some fans up on the hill? Please. And what about the pollution from all these new electrical generators?

A million cars sucking new electrical juice for their collective batteries will never be more than a novelty of the monied few. The average citizen has so far rightly ignored both of these fairy tales, or at least viewed them with a condescending grin. D.H. LEE JR.

Carnegie