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Car of the Future

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

Rarely does a documentary assessing an environmental issue manage to be entertaining, informative and relatively guilt-free. Car of the Future is such a program, looking at various options and prototypes in the motor world that are being designed to address an impending crisis triggered by our dependency on cars and petroleum.

Rather than bore the audience with statistics and doomsday rhetoric, the show presents optimistic solutions, gentle encouragement and light-hearted banter from the two hosts Click and Clack. This bumbling pair are otherwise known as Tom and Ray Magliozzi, renowned in the US for their motoring radio show.

This dynamic duo travels far and wide, from grandiose car shows to gritty garages to the public transport system of Iceland, to investigate the innovative design going into solving the issue caused by the 800 million cars currently on the road worldwide. Possible solutions include obvious ideas such as hybrid cars (which function on both a gas tank and an electric battery) and ethanol fuel substitution, to more experimental concepts such as simply lightening the overall weight of the car (without compromising its safety) or installing 6000 lithium batteries.

The overall message is one of hope and optimism, if we as a global society decide to promptly embrace the new technology.

Car of the Future airs on the SBS on Sunday, July 6, at 8:30pm.

Claire Ward, June 2008