Cars Have Come A Long Way Baby

The first internal combustion engine car was created in 1885 by a gentleman by the name of Karl Benz. At that time, there was just one car on the road.

One hundred and thirty-six years later there are roughly 1.3 billion mostly internal combustion engine vehicles on the road today including cars, trucks, and motorcycles. I think Mr. Benz would fall over in amazement at the cars in the following video, still using the internal combustion engine he was so instrumental in creating.

Video Courtesy Dutch Shell Oil and YouTube

This video is provided courtesy of Dutch Shell Oil at a great expense. Ferrari pulled several of their race cars from various ages out of storage, flew them to various locations around the world and filmed them racing through the streets of Rome, Rio, New York, Hong Kong, Honolulu and Monaco. The bill for the cost of clearing all those streets and roads must have been jaw-dropping. No computer graphics were used. These are the original cars on the original streets they raced on. A wonderful part of the video is the sound from the basso-profundo notes of the early, front-engine era, driving down a leafy country road with each scene cutting to a later generation of race car, ending with the bumblebee wail of a modern Formula 1 car.

Ostensibly, Shell is selling gasoline, but the cars used in the video steal the show. Even if you're not a gearhead, this video will stir the soul. There's just something heart-throbbing about a 3-liter engine turning at 14,000 RPM (revolutions per minute) with 1,100 BHP (brake horsepower).

It's hard to believe cars have evolved from the original motorized tricycle created by Karl Benz to the sleek, rockets that Formula 1 cars are today in just 130 short years.

Estimates are the world consumed 92.2 million barrels per day of petroleum and other oil-based fuels in 2020, a 9% decline from the previous year and the largest decline in EIA's series that dates back to 1980. COVID pandemic aside, is this in part due to the reality of climate change and global warming taking hold?

Will the move to electric take on an added urgency as climate change begins affecting more and more people around the world? You better believe it. That and hydrogen.

That screaming internal combustion engine so beloved by F1 fans around the world is on the way out. Fans of gasoline-powered dragsters should also be worried. Internal combustion out. Clean energy vehicles in.

Surprisingly enough, some of the earliest cars were steam-powered. The first recorded was as early as 1769 by a French inventor named Nicolas Cugnot. Some earlier cars were driven by springs and compressed air. Windmill-powered vehicles were made before them amazingly enough. However, it was not until Mr. Benz perfected the internal combustion engine the idea of cars as everyday vehicles took hold.

Where do cars as personal transportation devices go from here? I have three grandchildren all under the age of four. There is a school of thought they may never learn to drive. I am a retired mechanic having sold my business back in 1989. I never ever imagined the cars of today. Or that computers would be the main tool in a toolbox.

Anyone training to be a repair mechanic today is training for a dying industry. In twenty years or less, cars of today will be museum pieces. Auto garages with oil pits and hoists and jack stands will be oddities, only used by the true eccentrics.

Gas stations? What's that; my great-grandchildren will ask, as they are zipped from place to place in autonomous vehicles. Karl Benz and the engine he invented will be swept into the dustbin of history.

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