My first car was a 1983 Toyota Corolla hatchback, its color best described as sort of white. The cassette deck bolted under its faded blue dashboard worked about a third of the time. Its 70-some horsepower would strain mightily to achieve speed sufficient to climb a highway on-ramp. The 0-to-60 time hovered around 38 seconds. The window in the driver’s side door had the unsettling habit of falling out of place and sliding into the door’s cavity, which was fine during the West Texas summer but a profound bummer in the winter, when howling winds sent temperatures into the single digits.
But I loved that car. It got me to class and to the two—sometimes three—part-time jobs that made my education possible. Without that car, I couldn’t have baked bagels on the graveyard shift, waited tables at lunch, and delivered pizzas at night. It kept a roof over my head and books in my backpack (and De La Soul tapes playing in that tape deck). I loved the liberty it gave me—the independence of movement, the chance to head to the mall with friends or go on a too-rare Friday night date. The car was possibility, a dream within reach, and the clunky embodiment of that quintessentially American notion: freedom.
That was then. Today’s teenagers have finally managed to decouple the idea of freedom from the idea of car ownership. I have pals and colleagues with their own teenagers, none of whom own cars, let alone want them. Turns out Snapchat and Facebook are pretty good substitutes for hanging at the mall, and UberPool and Lyft Line are cheap and always-on ways to get around—even to work. No gas money to quibble about, no meter to feed, no insurance premium to sweat.
These facts are not lost on carmakers. Despite recovery from the Great Recession, the number of miles traveled by people 16 and over is 6 percent less than its peak in 2005 (when adjusted for population growth). Occasionally I visit with folks at the Big Three automakers, and in recent years I’ve seen a light sheen of panic on the faces of some Detroit executives. The American dream of freedom through car ownership was the backbone of their business, and today it’s taking a backseat to concepts like “human mobility,” “cars on demand,” and “data-driven infrastructure,” as companies scramble to figure out new business models to support new kinds of vehicles—electrified, autonomous, shared.
But if General Motors CEO Mary Barra is feeling nervous about the future, she isn’t showing it. Of course, Barra has always been a self-assured chief executive, but now she has a good reason to feel confident. This fall, GM rolls out the fully electric Chevy Bolt. And before you say, “But Tesla!” check out the stats: 200-mile range, $30,000 price tag (after government rebates). The race to build the first mass-market electric vehicle is almost over, and the winner is … GM. This is not a sentence my teenage self would have expected to read, or write.
As Alex Davies discovered while reporting his cover story on the Bolt, this eruption of 21st-century innovation occurred not in Silicon Valley—which has its own automotive aspirations brewing at Apple and Google—but in Detroit itself, that bastion of 20th-century technology. The trend (as Adam Rogers explains) is clear: Cars are about to get a major upgrade. I bet their windows will even stay closed.
