If I were to ask you what the most important invention in car history was, chances are you are not going to answer with the wheel. Yet without the invention of the wheel, cars as we know them would not exist today. No one knows who invented the wheel; it happened so long ago that the inventor has been lost to time. Yet his invention lives on in our everyday life. If I can speculate for a moment, I like to imagine the inventor of the wheel was an ancient man who just got tired of carrying stuff from point A to point B, and he sat down a figured out a better way.

It’s much the same for the invention of the automobile. Chariots and carriages had been around for a couple of thousand years at this point, and someone tried to figure out a better way. Although there were a few early prototypes in car history dating back to the eighteenth century, the man credited for the invention of the modern automobile is Karl Benz in 1886. Henry Ford later came up with the idea for mass production, and he is now known as the inventor of the assembly line. In the classic book Brave New World Aldous Huxley tells us about a future generation that considers Ford a god.

Of course, car history isn’t over, it’s only just begun. Sooner or later someone is going to find and easier and better way to make an automobile, and once again we will be treated to a triumph of man’s ingenuity and technology. I just hope it’s not a flying car, I’m afraid of heights.


*Green Automobiles - Fiction or Reality?* The idea of a transportation that is good for the environment is one that most anyone can support. All you have to do is look out on a major city and see the effects of the constant pollution and the massive number of vehicles to realize that something has to change.

But are green automobiles fiction or reality? There has been a huge push on the market for hybrid vehicles of all sorts. You can even now get huge gas gusslers that are hybrids - meaning that they are trying to be green, but really they are just slightly better than before.

Can you really call a car that used to get 8 miles per gallon and that now gets 14 miles per gallon a green automobile? I don't think so. That is the down side to the current push for green automobiles - they are created "less bad" but not truly "better" cars and then assuage peoples feelings about their impact on the environment.

For the vision of green automobiles to become a reality, the entire process of creating a green automobile must be taken into consideration. The environmental impact of creating green automobiles is not currently considered by most car companies. Their desire is to sell cars and they know that people buy cars with the idea that they will spend less on gas. True, some people have a desire to be green - but really it is human nature to desire self-benefit and in this case, it is about cash in the pocket.

Until the manufacturing process is modernized with the idea of creating truly environmentally friendly and using low-impact procedures, the green automobile is going to be more fiction than reality.

The advantage of the current move toward more green automobiles is that it creates funds and motivation for large businesses to invest in the future of green automobiles. That may be sufficient to truly transform the automobile industry and create a low-impact, high-efficiency, environmentally friendly vehicle.