The car of the future...

...in 1956!

America is still a land of automobiles and dreamers.  The optimism and possibilities of the future exhibited in 1956 seem to be dampened by new, darker visions of the future, but most of the world's population has retained it's desire for personal mobility, independence, and an automobile-enabled world.  Luckily cars today are cleaner, safer and more efficient and long-lasting than in the past.***  

 Give thanks for American optimists!   

"We're all set for auto control:"  GM's  jet age vision of the future

The problem with attempting to predict the future is this: Chances are almost certain that the reality will never match the rose-tinted vision of progress. In this 1956 Motorama short, filmed in VistaVision for widescreen viewing and featuring the Firebird II gas-turbine concept car, General Motors pictured a 1956 family imagining what life would be like two decades in the future. Surely problems like traffic congestion would be solved by then, even if flying cars were still the stuff of science fiction.

 

- See more at: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/tag/general-motors/#sthash.ujNaereI.dpuf 

*** From Cato Policy Analysis No. 653, "The Myth of the Compact City" by Randall O'Toole:

In the 1970s, advocates of compact development argued that it would reduce air pollution and save energy because people living in compact cities would drive less. Yet it proved to be far easier to simply build clean- er, more fuel-efficient cars than to completely rebuild American cities.

Between 1970 and 2007, for example, urban driving increased by 250 percent, but auto-related air pollution declined by more than two-thirds.22  Meanwhile, Americans responded to higher gas prices in the 1970s and early 1980s by buying cars in the 1990s that were an average of 40 percent more fuel efficient than those available in the early 1970s.23  In 1991, for example, Americans drove 41 percent more miles than in 1978, while using only 3 percent more fuel.24  After gas prices fell, Americans bought larger cars, but technological improvements produced a continuing increase of ton-miles-per-gallon.25  This shows that considerable progress can be made in improving fuel economy without reducing mobility.