In today's business world, even the most mild-mannered middle manager is supposed to imagine himself as a would-be Robespierre. It's all about "radical" innovation and revolutionary products that will overturn the established order in a single violent paroxysm. In this "off with their heads" climate, a true revolution requires a total break from what came before. If an innovation smacks of the familiar, it's tagged with that most dismal of labels: incremental.
Consider, for instance, the Toyota Prius. The Prius is a hybrid - powered by both a traditional internal combustion engine and an electric motor - and it's arguably the hottest car in America. US sales of hybrids are still meager (Toyota expects to sell about 50,000 Priuses in 2004). But so far this year sales are double those of the same period in 2003, despite the fact that each car costs $4,000 to $5,000 more than a comparable conventional one. Motor Trend recently named the Prius its 2004 North American Car of the Year. And most strikingly, nearly all the major auto manufacturers are on track to introduce their own hybrid models, including, oddly enough, SUVs. Industry forecasts suggest that by 2008, 2 percent of new cars sold in the US will be hybrids.
The virtues of the Prius and its siblings are hardly a secret: much higher gas mileage and much lower emissions. In the Prius, the electric motor handles start-up and low speeds, and assists the gas engine with acceleration and highway cruising. This reduces the car's demand for gasoline, while providing acceptable acceleration (0 to 60 mph in 10.5 seconds) and adequate top speed (105 mph). What's key, though, is that the electric motor doesn't merely supplement the internal combustion engine, but works in synergy with it and vice versa. The combination maximizes the strengths of the two technologies and minimizes their weaknesses.
For all that, though, hybrids are still seen by purists as a stopgap, a way to save a few extra barrels of oil and add a little less carbon monoxide to the atmosphere until something genuinely new comes along. That something new, of course, is the fuel cell-powered car, which will free us of our dependence on gasoline, allowing vehicles to live on hydrogen and emit only water vapor. Fuel cells have been on the ever-receding horizon for a while now. (The most optimistic forecasts are that fuel cell cars won't be mass-produced until 2020 at the earliest.) And there's no doubt that if they do arrive, they will be a revolutionary innovation.
But by keeping our eyes locked on the future, we're missing the truly radical nature of the present. The hybrid is the most important development in automobile technology since the introduction of the automatic transmission in 1938, or perhaps even the invention of the self-starting motor in 1911. It's the first successful alternative to the internal combustion engine since the early 20th century, when both steamers and electric cars were popular. And in technological terms, the hybrid represents a qualitative, and not just a quantitative, transformation in the way vehicles work. That's why Toyota, at least, calls the hybrid a "core" rather than a "bridge" technology. The synergy that propels the Prius will also likely be at the heart of fuel cell cars - if they ever materialize.
What's especially remarkable about the success of hybrids is that it's happened from the bottom up. Economists sometimes say there are two routes to innovation: technology push and market pull. In the first case, a cool technology is created and people have to be convinced they want it. In the second, a market exists for a solution to a problem, and it effectively pulls the technology out of the lab and into the real world. Before the recent hybrid boom, many would have said that the cars were a classic example of technology push, with Toyota and Honda trying to force vehicles on an uninterested public. But what has become clear is that the market for "environmentally sensitive" products is large and growing, and that people are willing to pay a premium for these products, as long as they don't have to compromise on quality.
The real triumph of the Prius is in demonstrating that this market exists, and that companies can reach it with a combination of decent performance and technological sophistication. And over the next few years, as economies of scale kick in, prices drop, and technology improves, the market for hybrids will grow. In the 1990s, GM's electric car failed because the demand for it never materialized. In the 2020s, fuel cell cars will only succeed if there's a massive public investment in the hydrogen infrastructure. But hybrids are hot because consumers want them. That makes them a much better bet.
Of course, the fact that there is a market for hybrids - and that they've required no massive reeducation campaign or cultural transformation - only makes them seem less radical than some people would like. But while there is nothing Jacobin about the emergence of the hybrid, it's still very much a nascent revolution. Though the hybrid car retains elements of the old, it's still genuinely new. Maybe the time has come for businesspeople to stop thinking about the French or Russian revolutions and to contemplate a different model: Eastern Europe in 1989, when relatively peaceful change turned everything upside down. So it may be with hybrids. If it's hard to see, it's because this revolution is not violent - it's velvet.
James Surowiecki (jamessuro@aol.com) is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Wisdom of Crowds.
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Why Hybrids Are Hot
