Efficiency.
I’ve always been a proponent of the philosophy of “doing more with less”. Not sure why, it’s some kind of deep-seated thing that probably goes back to my earlier days of using computers.
Every time you hear about a new computer game these days, the computer requirements for it have gone through the roof - you need this speed processor, that speed graphics card, and so on. If you can’t make it work on what is the standard hardware of the time (which was, of course, the latest, whizz-bang, all-singing, all-dancing hardware just a year or two ago), you just tell everyone they have to upgrade their hardware.
Smacks of laziness to me - it wasn’t like that back when I got serious about using computers. My Amiga had a 7.16MHz processor, the default graphics and sound hardware, and maybe a RAM upgrade at the most, from 512K to 1MB. And watching what very clever people did with this setup over the years was eye-opening, especially being part of the demo scene, where all the cleverest programmers lurked, playing pirated games, making free international phone calls and innovating more in their bedrooms than most professional programmers did in multi-million-dollar offices.
These clever sticks pushed the hardware beyond its limits, with more and more clever effects, larger numbers of moving objects and more colours on screen than had been concievable even a year or two before. There is something to be said of having fairly tight limits to work within - it brings the best out of people.
In the realm of computing, the only time you see this philosophy at work is in the world of console gaming - as a rule, you can’t upgrade the processor, RAM or graphics card in your Xbox, you just have to rely on the ingenuity of the programmers to extract more and more from whatever hardware they are presented with. You also see it with mobile phone games - my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i) has better graphics capabilities than my Amiga ever did, and I can talk to people using it, too. Shame I can’t attach a Kempston joystick to it and play these games on a screen that’s actually bigger than a postage stamp.
Outside of computing, this philosophy isn’t dead either, although it is becoming marginalised. Take the Japanese kei car, for instance.
Back in the ’50s, in order to raise the standard of living and stimulate their motor industry, the Japanese government wanted to encourage their citizens to buy cars instead of motorbikes, and created a new category of car - it had mandated maximum engine capacity, and the footprint of the car could be no bigger than 3.4m x 1.48m. If a car could fit within these limitations, the car could be sold as a kei car, and be subject to considerably lower taxation, much less restrictive parking rules and so on. This has led to some remarkable ingenuity in extracting the most in terms of performance, capacity and comfort.
Those little 660cc engines now have supercharging and turbocharging so they can go as fast as their larger siblings, some of these cars have more room inside them than cars twice their size, some even have 4-wheel drive, and are not lacking in the creature comforts and safety features that modern drivers take for granted. This is as a result of state-mandated innovation, that resulted in some ingenious men in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Sapporo to extract the most from the least.
Maybe this is why the American philosophy on cars doesn’t gel with me. It’s the antithesis of the kei car philosophy - every new model of car is bigger than the outgoing one, for no appreciable gain. None of these cars are in any way cleverer than what came before, just bigger and maybe slightly prettier. There are precious few concessions to efficiency, good packaging and versatility. Because, apparently, this isn’t what the American car-buying public want. They actually want bigger and less efficient, even in these days of inflating petrol prices and environmental panic. Something about safety, apparently. But it’s more like socially acceptable, neighbourly dick-swinging, if you ask me - my SUV is bigger than yours, therefore I’m more virile and valuable to the human race, and all that.
It’ll probably never happen while the oil companies run the US, but it’d be nice to see an American version of the kei car mandate - it’s hard to imagine, but it’d be great to see it happen. But, in the meantime, it’s great to see cars such as the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris selling well. They’re targeted at Generation Y, who will, of course, grow up to become the next generation’s movers and shakers - they believe in efficiency, climate change and the simple notion of making life cheaper for themselves, which is what this all comes down to.
Smaller, more efficient and more environmentally-friendly cars make sense on the simple premise that you pay less for them and they cost less to run, leaving you more money for other things. You’re doing just as much with less. That’s efficiency, and that works for me.
So I’ll be off down the Toyota and Scion dealership before too long, I think.
