What is sustainable motoring?
Transportation says a lot about where we have been and where we want to go.
This week we are launching Future (Forever) Motoring, a podcast and blog about what move us and the ways we move.
Though the podcast is about all forms of motoring, this blog explores new forms of sustainable motoring, especially electric bikes, motorcycles, and aircraft.
We look at the intimate relationships between design, art, and technology, discuss the ideas and potentials of new forms of transportation and energy use, and notice the ways these create our emotional, physical, and mental landscapes.
A motor, by definition, converts electrical energy into mechanical energy; it transitions energy into movement. The body does this in order to move itself. Vehicles extend that movement, both individually and collectively. We motor so we can move faster and farther and connect in new ways, but we’re now at a transitional moment—which means we’re set to move and be moved differently.
According to the International Energy Association (IEA), the number of electric vehicles sold in one week in 2021 was higher than all Electric Vehicles (EVs) ever sold in the year 2012. More than 10 million electric vehicles were sold in 2022, and we’re already expected to surpass 14 million this year (2023). As we explore in upcoming posts, this means we’ve just tipped into an extraordinary period in the global energy economy, one that will eventually touch every part of our lives and experience, as any revolution in transportation must.
Changes in how we move are also lifestyle changes.
Imagine a world without cars or planes. Imagine a childhood without a bicycle (or skateboard, or rollerblades) or without roads, or trails, or sidewalks. Consider removing any crucial form of motorized movement (the wheelchair, the lorry, the jet, the barge) and watch individual lives and global histories reconfigure themselves.
How we move establishes habits and infrastructures that radiate through all parts of our lives, affecting everything from where we go to what we spend our money on to the amount of healthcare we need. That’s true whether the vehicle in question is the human body alone, or whether it is some larger machine made to move that body better than it can on its own.
We create things to move us—whether it’s a plane or a film, a motorcycle, a piece of music, a book, our highway system, or the internet. From trails to roads, from flight paths to water routes, our lives as individuals and societies are unending lines and trajectories of movement. No matter whether we love or hate the vehicles carrying us along those trajectories, they’ve become impossible to separate from our memories, transitions, and histories.
The question at the heart of it all is: What does it really mean to motor forever?
Is sustainable motoring a paradox? a mandate? How can we understand motoring as ecological?
Our podcast dropped this week with six discussions about motoring and these questions and themes above. There is no one answer to any of them, and the conversations are the road itself when it comes to where we’re heading. Still, after these first exchanges with some of the top riders, designers and entrepreneurs of motoring, I’ve found the following five themes to have emerged and I hope they might offer something positive:
Strange is beautiful and less is more.
The key to sustainability is crafting objects that will last.
True sustainability connects our senses to the landscapes we are moving through.
Sustainable motoring starts early and forms familial ties that do not break.
Sustainable motoring can be akin to meditation or a martial art.
Transportation is who we are and who we were and who we want to be. We are our individual and collective movement in all the spaces we move through and are moved through. Transportation is social history. It’s what connects us over time and space, both literally and metaphorically, because it comes down to big issues like trust, control, power and faith.
A shift seems to be taking place in all those realms now, one where instead of escaping and overwhelming our senses, we are learning better how to heighten and enliven them. We are learning that there is a difference between not attempting to control and being out-of-control, between edgework that is about exploring and extending what is possible versus edgework that is about escaping or going over the cliff. After all, as Matt Chambers says in Episode 1, “the most glorious road is the road of your life” and that’s a road we’re all already on. Electric can be a more sensual and immersive way of exploring it.
Towards that goal, I explore Five Themes of Sustainable Motoring here in more detail.
I look forward to hearing what ideas they raise and learning about your experiences.