If There Had Never Been Automobiles

[sackett]

Suppose that Otto and Duryea and Daimler and the others had stood back from their proof-of-concept vehicle and remarked, wiping their hands on oily cotton waste, “Welp. It works, but it’ll never pay if it can’t carry freight.” Then they’d set out to find bigger powerplants (Herr Diesel was doing interesting work about then) and embark on a scaling-up project, and

And the idea of the small private motor vehicle would never have occurred to anybody, and today that cursed thing, the automobile, wouldn’t exist.

I have nothing against trucks and buses, and I think they’d fill their niches, but the vast, unsightly, wasteful infrastructure that has grown around the private car would never be needed, or conceived of, to keep large IC-engined machines on the road.

Imagine a world without cars. How would things be different?

 

[Bob001]

Suppose that Otto and Duryea and Daimler and the others had stood back from their proof-of-concept vehicle and remarked, wiping their hands on oily cotton waste, “Welp. It works, but it’ll never pay if it can’t carry freight.” Then they’d set out to find bigger powerplants (Herr Diesel was doing interesting work about then) and embark on a scaling-up project, and

And the idea of the small private motor vehicle would never have occurred to anybody, and today that cursed thing, the automobile, wouldn’t exist.
.....

It's a silly premise. People have had private transportation in the form of animals and carts for thousands of years. You can read accounts of how hard it was to avoid horse droppings on big city streets pre-1900. Freight was being transported by rail long before anyone developed the first truck. And no one person "invented" the first car. Pretty much as soon as the IC engine was developed, people were trying to design small vehicles around it, and others were using steam engines and battery power.

You may as well ask "Suppose nobody had ever thought of burning oil?" or "Suppose nobody thought people could fly?" or "Suppose no one thought of sending electricity through wires?" That's not what happened.

 

[Trebuchet]

We'd be up to our knees in *********.

ETA: Oops, I thought perhaps the auto-censor would leave the first part of that word, which was "horse".

 

[theprestige]

Imagine a world without cars. How would things be different?

Well, first thing is, we'd invent cars.

This signature is intended to irradiate people.

 

[smartcooky]

We'd be up to our knees in *********.

ETA: Oops, I thought perhaps the auto-censor would leave the first part of that word, which was "horse".

Try hyphenating...

horse-****

 

[JoeMorgue]

Knightrider, Fast and the Furious, and Mad Max would have been weird...

But in more seriousness I think at the most basic level "automobiles" are just one of those things that were going to happen in some way.

Once concepts like some form of "engine" came about I don't see any possible scenario in which a powered vehicle wasn't going to happen.

 

[shemp]

We'd all have flying cars instead!

 

[ddt]

I don't think it's realistic to suppose that trucks would have been developed, but not private cars.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Knightrider, Fast and the Furious, and Mad Max would have been weird...

But in more seriousness I think at the most basic level "automobiles" are just one of those things that were going to happen in some way.

Once concepts like some form of "engine" came about I don't see any possible scenario in which a powered vehicle wasn't going to happen.

It would have been Fallout without the Corvega wrecks.

 

[bluesjnr]

Watch an episode of The Flintstones for your answer.

 

[Bikewer]

The bicycle was already a thriving concern at that time, and many of the innovations like the pneumatic tire and paved roads were invented to make travel by bicycle easier to manage.

The "safety" bicycle, the prototype for today's machines, was invented right around the turn of the century.
Not a big step from efficient human-powered transportation to sticking a motor in one.

 

[theprestige]

The bicycle was already a thriving concern at that time, and many of the innovations like the pneumatic tire and paved roads were invented to make travel by bicycle easier to manage.

The "safety" bicycle, the prototype for today's machines, was invented right around the turn of the century.
Not a big step from efficient human-powered transportation to sticking a motor in one.

Indeed, turn-of-the-century bicycle racer Glenn Curtiss started slapping ICs on two-wheeled vehicles as soon as they became available. POVs were inevitable. I mention Curtiss because he was widely regarded as one of the foremost IC experts in the world.

 

[marplots]

This doesn't make any sense - what would happen to all the hitchhikers? Would they just stand there, confused?

 

[Brainache]

Maybe someone would have invented electric horses...

 

[sackett]

A disappointing collection of responses. Can nobody imagine a world without cars? The automobile is a mass transit system (an engineer had to point that out to me), and you could hardly design a worse one: wasteful, disruptive, dangerous, inefficient, and ugly. Surely you can envisage a past, and a present, in which the silliness of the small motor vehicle -- and in the hands of Mr. Average Man! -- would be evident to everyone.

My assumption, unspoken initially but pretty obvious, is that the world would be better off without the automobile. But I might be wrong about that. Can someone show how bicycles, trolleys, buses, trucks, and trains couldn't improve on the horseless carriage?

For example, how is a town like Amsterdam improved by the cars on its streets?

 

[Sideroxylon]

To imagine a world without cars is to imagine the world before them.

 

[Bob001]

....
My assumption, unspoken initially but pretty obvious, is that the world would be better off without the automobile. But I might be wrong about that. Can someone show how bicycles, trolleys, buses, trucks, and trains couldn't improve on the horseless carriage?
....

You didn't ask whether public transportation could be improved, whether use of automobiles in urban centers should be discouraged, etc. Your premise was that no one had ever imagined building private automobiles and that the world had developed without them. You don't seem to understand how technology develops and how markets work. Do you think some higher power made many hundreds of millions of consumers around the world buy cars they really didn't want, or what? Do you think there has never been a need for personal transportation, or that the need should only be filled by oxcarts, or what? I repeat, it's a silly premise.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Take an aircondtioned horse drawn sedan to the airport, catching up with work on your laptop along the way.

 

[The Don]

Can someone show how bicycles, trolleys, buses, trucks, and trains couldn't improve on the horseless carriage?

I need to get myself, Mrs Don and around 100kg of assorted "stuff" from my rural home to my father's house which is in a small town around 450km away.

Using a horseless carriage, that journey takes between 4 and 5 hours and can be started at any convenient time. We can travel in comfort, our stuff is safely stored and only needed to be carried to the car once and will be unloaded once.

The alternative would be to get some kind of short-distance transport (we couldn't easily walk with the 100kg of stuff) to travel the 10 km to our nearest station. The rail journey would take around 6 or 7 hours changing at least twice, once to get onto the main line and once to get off the main line - assuming that the Beeching cuts never happened - then we'd still have to find some way to travel that last mile.

Twice the time, several times the inconvenience.

I suppose if there were "podulons" which could take us directly from place A to place B might work but would still require "podulon" infrastructure.

IMO a world without horseless carriages only works if everyone lives in large population centres. When I lived in London in my early 20's it never occurred to me to have a car there, there was no need. Rural areas OTOH don't have anything like the population density to support effective public transport.

 

[Bikewer]

Agreed...." wasteful, disruptive, dangerous, inefficient, and ugly."

(Well, we'd have to argue with many about the "ugly" bit...Many think various machines are works of art)

But, there are other qualities. Freedom. You can jump in and go where you want, when you want, without needing a schedule, a fixed route, or a pass.

Personal expression. Not so much at the beginning, when horseless carriages were pretty similar, but within a very few years there were dozens of manufacturers and they were producing a wild and creative bunch of machines.

Status. From the very beginning, being able to afford an automobile was a status symbol and even when mass production started churning out relatively cheap and identical vehicles there was a strong market for more expensive luxury items for the elite.

That remains the case to this very day.