Tiny Cat Warriors

The Germans - they make good stuff

The Sham Wow guy had it right - BMW has an answer for those of us who thought that going green, auto-wise, would necessarily mean an end to performance driving.  BMW just announced a new performance hybrid, the Vision Efficientdynamics Concept , which will debut at the Frankfurt auto show later in September.  A 356 hp all-wheel drive plug-in hybrid - this looks pretty awesome.  0 to 62 mph (100 kph) time of 4.8 seconds is very impressive, and probably due substantially to 590 ft-lbs of torque, which is a huge torque number.  All this while averaging 62.2 mpg.  

While the Vision is, for now, just a concept car, it definitely gives us some idea of where BMW is heading in the near future.  I'm currently an owner of a 750Li & was thinking of getting a new car - this might cause me to wait a year and see where BMW is going and if there'll be some performance hybrid in BMW's near future.

Warren G. Bennis on the Factory of the Future

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." -Warren G. Bennis

What will the future be like?

When I was a kid in the late 1950s (now that I'm older, I feel compelled to make sure and add late 1950s - it's the middle aged equivalent of a 5 year old saying he's not 5 but 5 1/2 or 5 3/4) and 1960s, there were articles all the time about what the future would look like in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.  It seemed like there were articles all the time in Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and every kids' magazine speculating about how we'd get around, what we'd be eating, or whether we'd be able to just take pills to learn things instead of going to school. 

Flying cars seemed a fait accompli for the year 2000 and personal jetpacks would probably occur sooner.

I'm wondering what's happened to us since then.  I don't see a lot of articles touting how we'll be living in the year 2040.  A cynical view is that no one cares because no one thinks there'll be a civilization left by then.  I think I'm viewing technology (probably not the gadget tech stuff, but energy and defense technology) as being part of the solution to why there will still be western civilization 50 years from now.  Hopefully.

I think my take on the lack of wonderment about 20 to 100 years in the future is that technology is changing so fast now that it's hard to contemplate what the future will be like in 5 years.  Cell phones and PCs are on about 3 month model cycle and rather than having 2 or 4 clothing seasons during a year, the retailers, especially for teen girls, have moved to a 3 to 4 week product cycle.  Change is happening so fast that we've all gone tharn (Watership Down) and we're just letting the changes wash over us rather than wondering about a generation or two in the future.