What is wealth?

I once heard Jörg Guido Hülsmann say that there is no nice, clear definition of what an economic good is. I do sort of agree with that. What is a good? Something that provides some benefit? Dictionary.com says:

a commodity or service that can be utilized to satisfy human wants and that has exchange value.

OK, so it satisfies human wants and as a result it has some value in exchange. I want to explore a broader definition: wealth. Normally we think of people who earn a lot of money as wealthy. They often buy expensive houses and cars, perhaps a nice yacht or Gulfstream jet.

Pictured above: wealth?

I think we can be a little more creative than that. Here's my definition of wealth:

Wealth is any factor that gives ease.

Short, I know, but it has some pretty important implications. First of all, there are two types of wealth: that which can be bought and that which cannot, in other words economic goods and other things that don't have a price but nevertheless give some satisfaction.

Examples of economic wealth might be a house, or manufacturing plants. Examples of non economic wealth are when things start to get interesting. Your spouse is part of your wealth. So are you children and your parents, your friends and so on. They all (hopefully) make your life better in some way, so they are included in wealth, but you can't buy love. Love you give also makes you wealthy since it increases your contentment with life and the joy you have with your friends or family. If you value these things more than all economic goods, then you are by definition more wealthy than the chairman of a bank (provided that he cares less for his family or friends). Most people would not trade their families for even extraordinary economic wealth, which proves that they value them more.

Now I want to highlight one of the most important aspects of Christianity. Anyone who has God is so wealthy that no friend, family, money or any other thing can significantly improve his wealth. That is not to say that those things have no value, but compared to God, they have insignificant value. That is one of the reasons that Jesus says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." He doesn't actually mean that we should hate those people, or our own life. What He does mean is that the value we place on following Him must always be greater than on any other thing - relationships, even life itself. Because to have Him is the greatest good of all and nothing else can compare. He's just asking us to recognise that fact and act on it.

Fallacies of the eugenicists

Eugenics has a pretty bad reputation, but at the centre it's just people who want to make the world a better, more resilient place. Well, um, not, actually, that's not really true. Eugenicists take the view that modern society has a lot of substandard genetic stock floating around, making babies, and that this is a Bad Thing. It's a Bad Thing because that means that the good, strong people are having their genes diluted by the weak, feeble-minded majority, and this means that we will be more easily wiped out by some sort of plague or somesuch. The only possible conclusion is that we have to increase the "productivity" of the strong and decrease that of the weak. In practice, this has meant killing the weak, forcibly sterilising them, discouraging them from getting married, peddling contraception and abortion to them, and least distasteful of all, encouraging the "strong" to have more children. There are many fallacies bound in this view, and I want to go through a few of them because some are not so obvious.

Fallacy number 1: we're getting weaker.
Genetically speaking, this is perhaps true, in some ways. That's one of the things that makes it such a tempting thing to think about. The theory of evolution tells us that if you decrease selection pressure on a population then you will, on average, see those individuals that would not have been able to survive previously survive and have offspring. In our modern caring society many people who in the stone age would have died because of medical conditions no longer have their heads explode and thus pass on those defective genes to the next generation, making their condition more likely in the future.
Have you spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: we have become weaker because fewer people are dying. Um, what? From an evolutionary standpoint, fewer members of a species dying means that they are stronger, better adapted, fitter. Modern society and technology gives us more machines meaning less toil, better medicine meaning when we get sick we have a good chance of getting better, more wealth meaning we have more varied and interesting lives. This is not called "things getting worse", so the idea that we are worse off with all these genetic degenerates is absolute crap.

Fallacy number 2: getting rid of the weak would make us stronger.
The idea here is that we should stop the weak having babies and make the strong have lots more babies to make up the shortfall. The result would be a stronger population overall and if calamity hit then we'd be better placed to weather it.
This fallacy is harder to spot, but have you seen it yet? Here it is: decreasing our genetic diversity would make us stronger. Um, what? Statistically speaking, a large population is fitter than a small one because it has more genetic variation, so even if we were subjected to a terrible catastrophe where a large fraction of the people died, the fact that there are more of us with more variability makes us more resilient, not less.

Fallacy number 3: some people have no significant value to society.
This one is true, actually - of the eugenicists, mostly, at least in their capacity as proponents of eugenics. The idea here is that people with severe genetic handicaps are totally pointless. There's no benefit to having them live - in fact, they are a nett drain on society's precious, finite resources. We'd be much better off screening against such people before birth and investing our resources in babies with sound physical and mental abilities. This particular view is fairly common nowadays - even though when you subject it to the light of truth it is monstrous - and it results in many abortions every year.
Spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: some people are worth more dead than alive. Um, what? This comes out of a completely skewed view of the value of human life - specifically, that it is measured in economic terms. Practically this would mean that you need to earn your right to live, which means that if someone murdered you before you'd done that, it would be perfectly OK. It means that life is not a right, but a privilege which can be revoked by others. It means that you do not own your body, it is owned by others - perhaps medical experts. Since the right to life, or ownership of oneself, is the most fundamental principle of civilisation, this perspective can only make us worse-off (to put it mildly). The fact that this is a common justification for abortion shows how misguided some have become. Even if you consider abortion totally ordinary and not at all a bad thing, the view that results in abortions of babies who are deemed to be not worth raising is monstrous.

I hope that I have shown that the major beliefs of eugenics are simply ideological and have no basis in real improvements in society. They therefore have no place in society and I reserve the utmost rejection of these views and I will ostracise anyone coming to me with them severely. If we really want to improve society, we can do little better than provide the most freedom and private property that can be physically possible. That is what has made us the powerful society we are today and we seem to have largely forgotten it. Beware of anyone who says that some other person's life is not worthwhile. He is attacking the foundation of civilisation itself, and that is no understatement.

Gold: some little-known factoids

Nowadays, very few people have any experience with large quantities of gold. This was mostly true in years past, of course, since there has never been and will never be a "lot" of gold around. However, this lack of understanding about the yellow metal does lead to some pretty interesting assumptions and depictions.

What started all this off was when I saw the new movie Tintin, yesterday. It was a pretty ordinary movie, as these things go, but apart from all that at the centre of the plot is some sort of gold treasure. This is described as "four hundredweight of gold" which is depicted in the film as a secret hold in a wooden ship about 1 foot deep in gold coin and assorted jewels and treasures. This brings my to my first factoid:

1. Gold is much denser than is generally supposed.

Most people's experience with the density of metals comes from steel. When we pick up an aluminium object, at least, when I do, I often get "tricked" by how light it is, especially if I can't see what colour the metal is. Iron and most steels hover around the 7.8 g/cc mark, meaning that a cubic meter of them would weigh 7.8 tonnes. Put another way, a tonne would occupy 128 L of volume, or a cube 50 cm on a side. Gold is considerably denser than iron, at more than 19 g/cc. A one tonne cube of gold, should you ever be unlucky enough to be asked to move one, would be just over 37 cm on a side. This means that the amount of gold depicted in the Tintin movie is something like 10 or 20 tonnes, way more than the 200 kg or so that "four hundredweight" would represent.
This also makes gold dangerous, specifically, the types of gold bars used to store gold in vaults. The bars in the Fort Knox depository each weigh about 12.5 kg and are only an 4.5 cm wide, so you can imagine crushing a finger by dropping one just a small distance. The heaviest bar ever made weighs 250 kg and if I remember correctly, if you can pick it up you can have it.

You'd look pretty stupid with that for a hand, though

2. Gold is inert.

Most people do know this one, but it's actually pretty amazing just how reluctant gold is to do anything, chemically speaking. Not many metals could shrug off a bath of concentrated sulphuric acid or caesium hydroxide solution (dissolves glass, your dog etc), but gold can. That's all I can say without being boring about this one. This is one of the reasons we plate quite a lot of gold onto electrical connections. It doesn't help conductivity much per se but it does prevent corrosion forming that would affect the conductivity of the join.

3. Gold is soft.

Gold is by no means the softest metal around, but it is pretty limp for a metal that is often used to make objects out of. That's why in some movies about the old West you see people biting gold coins. If you bit into an iron coin plated with gold then it would not leave teeth marks but gold will flow even under this modest pressure. This also makes it lovely for making fine jewelery, since you don't need a hammer to make it do the intricate shapes.

4. Gold is malleable.

This might seem like the same thing as soft, but the two are only slightly related. Malleability is the tendency of a metal to remain soft as you work it. Copper, while quite soft is not very malleable. It will work harden into something impossibly unworkable, but gold will keep on flowing smoothly and evenly no matter how much you hammer it. This means you can hammer (or roll, these days) gold into incredibly thin sheets or wires.

5. Gold is an exceptional heat reflector.

Many times you will see gold foil in a satellite. The Lunar Module had quite a lot of gold foil on it as well, and the reason for this is that gold is the best way to stop heat radiation, or to reflect it, more precisely. This also means that it is used in some top end race cars and F1 cars around the engine bay, to prevent the heat generated by the engine from leaking out and damaging sensitive part of the car. Satellites are similarly protected from the intense heat radiation coming from the Sun.

Of course, not every satellite is made entirely of gold

6. Gold supports surface plasmons.

This is really esoteric for most people, but the practical upshot is that you can use gold to make red glass:
This is also called cranberry glass, and its rather nice colour comes not from gold ions but very small particles of gold embedded in the glass. So if you divide this yellow metal up finely enough, it begins to appear red. Silver also does something similar but most glass colouring as a result of the presence of metals invove their ions, not nanoparticles, making this type of glass fairly unique.

A new precious metal standard

A lot of economists of the Austrian or "philosophical" (as I like to call them) school yearn to be back on the gold standard. This, it seems, is the gold standard of money supply options. It solves all the problems of inflation, deflation government credit expansion and private credit expansion, so it must be good, right?

Gold

Well, sort of. Most of these people would, I imagine, envision a return to gold coins and private bank notes backed up by 100% reserve requirements. Personally I think that gold is too valuable and will make small transactions tricky. The obvious answer is silver but then you can't go bimetallic with a fixed exchange rate or there will be trouble. The other problem with gold and silver, the most serious problem as I see it, is that they are quite soft and suffer wear, thus lowering their value over time. There are engineering solutions to this, and I believe I have come up with one of them.

Most coins of the last few centuries are pretty similar. Raised images and lettering on both sides, with a raised edge produced through rolling. These days the raised edge is just part of the work hardening of the piece, really, since most coins contain a large amount of copper, but in the past it was there to make coin clipping easily visible. Coin clipping is the practice of cutting pieces off a precious metal coin in order to sell the valuable metal or strike your own coins. Precious metal coins are supposed to be a particular weight and purity, which is certified by the fact that they are struck as coins. Leave most of the coin intact while removing a small piece of it, and you can spend the coin at the same value as before, plus you now have some extra gold to sell.

The fact that a substantial portion of the coin is proud gives us the chance to produce a more durable gold or silver coin. Simply replace the edge and the images with some superalloy like inconel, strike the whole thing together and you have a (mostly) gold coin with that attractive two tone finish that can really handle the ravages of everyday commerce.

Not exactly what I meant but you get the idea

Gold is so much more valuable than inconel that it will represent nearly all of the coin's value, and you may then produce coins with quite a small amount of gold set into them to make smaller denominations. Speaking of which, here comes engineering solution number two.

It is not enough to simply put vanishingly small amounts of gold into a coin. This would cause problems if nickel or any of the other major constituents of inconel were to seriously appreciate in value at some future date. You must therefore use a third, intermediate value metal. Silver fits the bill perfectly. Traditionally, it was necessary to use coins of pure silver or pure gold, to allow transactions to occur in either metal at universal equal value, with a floating exchange rate between the two to avoid the consequences of Gresham's law. I don't think that is necessary. Since by using a nickel alloy we are effectively already on a bimetallic standard with mixed coins, let's introduce the silver gradually down the value scale. Very high denomination coins would be nearly all gold, then as we go to lower denominations there would be an increasing fraction of silver until silver was the only "precious" metal in a particular denomination, and then we could increase the inconel content to get the lower denominations. This pretty much solves the exchange rate problem since we would balance the face value of the coins to be related to the historical average exchange rate (about 40:1, if you were wondering), and the gradual change over of the metals gives the exchange rate actually quite a wide variability without the relative value of denominations close to one another changing significantly. In fact my analysis shows that you can actually modify the exchange rate by a factor of 1.5 and commerce would be virtually unaffected, unless someone tries to get change in 5c pieces of a $1000 coin. Exchange rate problems could occur, in fact, if gold or silver changed significantly in value relative to the other and many people got the idea to exchange high gold for high silver content coins, or vice versa. In this case the face value would be off by enough to make the arbitrage worthwhile. But there is a very simple solution to this as well: float the exchange rate for exchanges of coins with large differences in the magnitude of their face value. It's not really that inconvenient, since such exchanges would be rare and trying to fix the face values for all time would increase the number of such exchanges, so floating that rate makes them unprofitable, unless someone were to have prior knowledge of a relative price spike in either metal which is pretty rare.

Now we come to the sticky subject of bank notes. Under the above monetary system, it would be most efficient to have each bank duly print its own notes or perhaps contract some excellent third party printer, which amounts to the same thing, but, crucially, the bank notes should have the same denomination as the precious metal currency they are standing in for. When someone presents a bank with one of its own notes, say a $5, it should give a $5 coin, or if both parties agree, $5 in other change at whatever floating exchange the two agree on. Banks should in general be willing to accept the notes of other banks, since they can then simply go to the bank in question and demand their specie for use as loans or reserves.

Loans and demand deposits are an interesting one. If all demand notes were to have a specified loan lifetime then the interest the bank earned loaning the money out could pay the storage fee. The note could then be redeemed at any time after the loan expiry but, critically, there would be an incentive to redeem the note as soon as it fell due, since banks could charge a storage fee or keep the money loaned out earning them nice interest for which the bearer could not demand a return. He would then want to redeem the note and perhaps loan the money out again at a better interest rate, save it in his own safe or just spend it. Banks could even redeem demand notes sooner than the due date, for a small fee of course.

All of that would mean that the total money supply might be about double the amount of the actual gold and silver. Now let's consider loans. In this economy, all bank loans would come out of savings in those banks of actual savers who have actually deposited the money there. They could not simply print more demand notes than there was metal, since other banks and people would certainly come to redeem them. They would, however, print loan notes. These would be interest bearing assets given to people who deposit money for a given time at a given interest rate. The loan's value, due date and interest rate would be on the loan note. If the depositor fell on hard times he could liquidate the note by selling it to a bank, or anyone really. The price paid for it would closely relate to all three essential features of a loan: interest, term and principal. These loan notes, then, would not circulate as currency but would be rapidly convertable, making them a kind of money. Their impact on the money supply would not be great, however. The borrower would be given demand notes or specie, what he preferred would make little difference to the bank. Large loans might require a fairly hefty amount of gold so it would be more convenient for someone borrowing money to build a power station, for instance, to get that money as demand notes, but in principle any form of money would be equal.

Hyperinflation 2

In my previous treatment of hyperinflation I said that instead of thinking of it as a monetary phenominon, happening when a government prints a lot of currency very fast, we should think of it as a systemic rejection of the currency by everyone engaging in commerce. At that time I didn't have proof, but now with money supply figures I got out of Wikipedia, I think I can demonstrate the point.

OK the way this is done is, we take the value of the Zimbabwe dollar in terms of US dollars and multiply it by the number of Zimbabwe dollars we think might have been around at every particular time and, voila, that gives us the value of the money supply. Now, it is important to realise that all of the figures I used are subject to systemic and random error, and there are large gaps I had to fill in with numbers I guessed were intermediate. So you can forget about accuracy, but I do believe that the data will still serve to illustrate my point.

The first chart shows the relative value of the Zimbabwe dollar over 10 months of the hyperinflation. As you will see, holding on to the currency at this time is economic suicide. Your money will be essentially worthless in about half a year:
This period, beginning on 5th of January 2007, doesn't even deal with the worst hyperinflation. Under extreme hyperinflation the graph has roughly the same shape, but the time taken to lose all your money can be measured in days or even hours.

In order to chart the magnitude of inflations this high, we have to resort to logarithmic measurements. The chart below shows the growth in the amount of money you would have to give in exchange for US currency:
0 here means 1, which is the index point on 5th of January 2007. Two and a half years later you'd need $853 sextillion to buy the same thing. Such numbers are simply beyond the experience of everyone. Even physicists who regularly deal with extremely small numbers (like the size of an atom) or very large ones (like the mass of the galaxy) would have trouble getting their heads around this one. Rather conveniently, for me, it is roughly the number of atoms in a lump of aluminium weighing 38 grams. If you laid those atoms end to end in a single line, they would go from the Sun to Neptune and back 12 times. See what I mean?

Now that we have some idea of the changing value of the currency, we need to have some idea of the amount of currency in circulation. The chart below shows a very rough view of the money supply - on a logarythmic scale, of course, otherwise the fine structure of the graph would disappear and we'd just have a "hockey stick":
This chart begins in August 2006. These figures are subject to a lot of uncertainty, of course, but as a ball park this allows us to get some idea of the value of the money supply:
Bingo! Observe the money supply's value going to 0. Again, this tracks the supply from 5th of January 2007. An important point on this data is that the first 11 months is a period when the Reserve bank did not report money supply data, so it is pure interpolation. There is further interpolation later on as well, but the overall picture is not deceptive: the money supply is being rejected and the most interesting portion of the graph, around 10-14 months, has plenty of data points. Consider the logarithmic version of this chart:
The bubble towards the end there is telling us that the very large increase in the money supply that happened around the beginning of 2008 temporarily caused an uptake in the economy. People started to accept the new currency, but notice how quickly that currency bubble went south. Five months later, the currency was worse off than ever, even though the face value was rocketing upward. At this point the currency was re-indexed at a rate of 10 billion old dollars is 1 new dollar. The fresh currency has been no better accepted.

Hyperinflation

Hyperinflation is usually defined as any rate of inflation above 50% per month (that is, an item that cost $1 this month will cost about $1.50 next month). Inflation itself seems to be a tricky phenominon for economists, as I mentioned in an earlier post (which turned out to be riddled with factual errors but I aim to improve), but it's usually some sort of general price rise. There are several reasons for a price rise to occur under the current monetary system, and I will deal with them very briefly so that we have a foundation for considering the implications for hyperinflation.

The first kind of inflation is what everyone thinks of: banks producing slightly more money than is offset by real goods in the economy, and as a result the prices of goods go up, because the demand of money goes down slightly. Here in Australia we are accustomed to inflation of 2-3% per year, but in many of the "backwards" countries annual rates of 10% or more are normal.

The second kind of inflation also manifests as a price increase, but is not the result of too many dollars printed. If two countries with their own free floating fiat currencies engage in trade, and there is a trade deficit then the currency of the "seller" country will strengthen (their prices will drop lower than what they would otherwise have been because imports will become cheaper) and that of the "buyer" country will weaken (causing imports to become more expensive). This is functionally equivalent to two countries using the same currency trading. Currency will drain out of the buyer country into the seller country, which will be able to buy a lot of goods and services from the buyer country in return.

The third kind of inflation is really just an increase in market price of certain goods due to shortages. For instance, during a famine food prices become extremely high, because people prefer not to starve to death and will pay whatever it takes not to.

Now, I will put it to you that hyperinflation, as I define it, may involve any of those situations but is in fact a separate phenominon altogether.

Investopedia defines hyperinflation as:

Extremely rapid or out of control inflation. There is no precise numerical definition to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a situation where the price increases are so out of control that the concept of inflation is meaningless.

It goes on to say:

When associated with depressions, hyperinflation often occurs when there is a large increase in the money supply not supported by gross domestic product (GDP) growth, resulting in an imbalance in the supply and demand for the money. Left unchecked this causes prices to increase, as the currency loses its value.

When associated with wars, hyperinflation often occurs when there is a loss of confidence in a currency's ability to maintain its value in the aftermath. Because of this, sellers demand a risk premium to accept the currency, and they do this by raising their prices.

Now I mentioned that hyperinflation is a tough nut to crack. Look at what this article on The Library of Economics and Liberty says:

What causes hyperinflations? No single shock, no matter how severe, can explain sustained, continuously rapid growth in prices.

That is because the empirical evidence is garbled. Somtimes it is triggered by this, at other times it is triggered by that. Sometimes it happens with mild monetary inflation (my first explanation of inflation) sometimes it is only triggered when that is more severe. It is the wisdom of the Austrian economists in thinking about economics as a deductive discipline rather than an empirical science that leads me to the conclusions I will shortly be mentioning.

First I want to redefine hyperinflation.

Imagine an economy where the entire money supply is $10. Now imagine that the central bank pays its board of two governers $10 each one day, and they go to spend their money. Suddenly the amount of circulating money has increased by a factor of 3, which means that once things stabilise the prices will also be about three times as high as before, in one day. But now imagine the people don't make a stink about this. Maybe they are a very cowed population. This $20 that the two governers can spend allows them to buy pretty much everything, since no one else has anything like as much cash. They buy all the food and products of the entire country. This is an extreme example of the "inflation tax". Monetary inflation results in a slow transfer of wealth from people who get the money last to people who can spend the money first, in this case from everyone else to the two governors. I do not regard this as hyperinflation. It is extremely high inflation in my example, and there are good reasons to believe that this sort of action will cause a hyperinflation episode, but in this case, because the population just allow themselves to be robbed of real goods in exchange for paper money, the "real value" of the money supply remains the same. Everyone's price now becomes three times as high, so life can go on pretty much as it had before.

Now consider a second economy with some amount of fiat money. Again it doesn't matter exactly how much there is, it is all serving to enable trade between people. Let us say that their reserve bank's computers and printing presses are broken and they cannot print any new money for a long time. The supply of the money remains totally constant. Now one day for no specific reason, people begin to question the value of their currency. They start to spend it and buy real goods with it so they won't suffer loss if the currency tanks. As a result of lots of people doing this, the velocity of money is increasing rapidly, leading to rapid inflation. The more prices inflate, the more the money velocity goes up. Pretty soon money is spent as soon as it is earned, and prices are still climbing fast. Not long after this people simply stop accepting the currency. It has become totally worthless. They prefer to look for someone to barter with than to take the currency, because it can only be used as money and now it doesn't even serve that purpose. Now life cannot go on as before, because the "real value" of the entire money stock is now 0. Nothing. No one will accept it as payment for goods or services rendered. This is what I consider hyperinflation. It represents not a rise in prices due to an increase in the money supply but an accelerating and, if not checked, complete loss of confidence in a fiat currency. This causes prices to approach infinity. This grows out of the fourth type of inflation: an increase in money velocity.

Thus: Hyperinflation is a period in which the value of the money stock decreases significantly as people turn to foreign currencies, commodity money and barter to clear transactions.

In the first scenario prices increased extremely rapidly but the value of the entire money stock remained constant. In the second case the money stock remained constant but confidence in it waned and winked out. Since the real value of the money stock goes to 0, it doesn't matter if the central bank prints money. This will keep things going for perhaps a little while longer, but if the note's real value, as seen by everyone, is 0, then it doesn't matter if its denomination is 10 or a googolplex, it just won't be accepted as payment. At this point inflation is effectively infinite, since you can write an arbitrarily large number on the note and it won't be enough to buy a paperclip.

That is not to say that people don't find some use for all the worthless notes:

Wallpaper

Firewood

Civil engineering projects

The chart below shows the official (red) and unofficial (blue) exchange rate of the Zimbabwe dollar with the US dollar during their period of hyperinflation:
This chart has several interesting features. Firstly, the official value of the currency is consistently reported as less than its actual market value. Second, the inflation accelerates insanely fast: look at the vertical axis. The logarithmic scale makes it hard to appreciate just how vertical the line is on the right hand side. It actually bears a remarkable resemblance to another graph I posted on this very blog just a few months back:

To create the above chart I exponentially increased the dependent variable while exponentially decreasing the increments of the independent variable it was plotted against. So my pairs were (0,1), (24,2), (36,4), (42,8), (45,16) ... If we turn this situation around and consider the inflation as a simple loss of the real value of the money stock, this later curve becomes a straight line going down from 100% to 0% over the 48 months.

So, to recap: I define hyperinflation as those circumstances where the value of the money stock decreases sharply. This is a psychological phenominon, not a monetary one. If allowed to continue the value of the money stock will go to 0. Typically governments engage in spectacular monetary inflation to try to prop up the ailing currency but this never works, for the reasons I have outlined above. It does result in some pretty interesting banknotes though:

Seems legit

Because hyperinflation is a psychological phenominon its trigger can be hard to pin down. Basically it's anything that causes people to lose faith in the currency, often careless monetary inflation such as Weimar Germany. The trigger for the collapse of the currency rather depends. On a million things. Each situation is unique because all people are unique and the dynamics of the society will affect how the distrust spreads. So in one case it might be so many percent per month inflation that tips the balance, and somewhere else another percentage. Any way you cut it, though, it happens because the currency doesn't have intrinsic worth, and because the currency's production is controlled by a central bank whence the notes must be accepted by the people under pain of fine and or imprisonment.

Hyperinflation can never occur with a commodity money, because if it loses value as a medium of exchange you can use it for other things. Even gold, one of the most useless metals, can serve as pretty nice jewelery and these days we plate quite a lot of it on to electrical connectors to prevent corrosion. Printed paper, on the other hand, is good for nothing but to be pulped and made into toilet paper or charcoal briquettes. It's a pretty slow way of wallpapering your house - though I think it would be worth it just for the conversations you could have - and it doesn't burn that well. Thus if we want to make a currency that is really hyperinflation proof, it has to be on a commodity standard or just be a commodity.

So to answer the question that everyone always asks: can it happen to us. The answer is yes, it can happen to any fiat currency, and because the probability is there, there's every chance that one day it actually will happen, even if we in the Anglophone countries have been spared this pain thus far. Will it happen soon? That's a tough one. I don't think anyone can make that call. It's a divergent condition based on chaotic factors. Impossible to predict. You should be wary if our inflation gets about 10%, though. We're used to 3% and 10% would be a bit of a shocker. Perhaps enough to start driving people away from AUD and into whatever looks juicy at the time. If the reserve bank did insane amounts of quantitative easing that could potentially result in inflation if the banks were to actually lend that money out. Under the current low inflation most people will keep AUD, so providing there's no significant change in the status quo, AUD is safe for now. And because our notes are plastic, if they do lose value you can bung them in the oven and in a few minutes you have some rather fetching earrings, pendants, or mosaic tiles.

How to make driving safer.

A lot of road safety messages these days focuses on speeding. This always rubs me the wrong way, because while there is a kernel of truth it is smothered in a giant pile of lies.
When we get a new TAC ad about speeding, the message is invariably that speeding is what kills people on the road. We have had this drilled into us for so long now that people are in real danger of thinking that speeding is the only thing killing people on the road. This couldn't be further from the truth.
Most people think speeding is travelling at any speed greater than the limit on the road. It's what the TAC lead drivers to believe speeding is. This is a simple lie: speeding is actually "travelling at any speed greater than the safe speed for given conditions". Almost no drivers know this, even though the road safety campaigns actually assume it. That is, they say "speeding", meaning "travelling too fast for conditions regardless of limit" and drivers think "travelling faster than the limit". This dissociation between the message and its perception is actually causing a lot of accidents. People are dying because of speeding ads.
There are a number of reasons for this and I really don't want to bore people so I'll go through them fairly quickly.
First, false sense of security. On a road where the posted limit is 60, 60 may well be a safe speed in the dry, with little traffic and plenty of ambient light. It is unlikely to be a safe speed when the road is wet during a dark rush hour. Because drivers are constantly told that 1 km/h over the limit makes you a dangerous criminal, they increasingly tend to drive at the posted limits even if it is hazardous to do so.
Second, rigid speed adherence diverts driver attention. The less time you spend looking ahead for possible hazards, the more likely you are to have a crash. If a child walks into the road from behind a tree while you are looking at your speedo for 0.5 seconds, it will take you nearly a full second to respond to the hazard. The need to maintain exactly the speed limit makes you look at the speedo a lot more than normal, diverting attention that should be used to assess road conditions, forecast other drivers' behaviour, and thinking about possible hazards.
Third, reluctance to brake. If people are restrained under good conditions from travelling at a safe speed that is higher than the posted limit, this causes reluctance to waste time driving at any speed below the limit even if conditions demand it. This may sound the same as number 1, but it's quite different. Holding people back in this way makes them slightly tense, and to save time they will travel at the posted limit if at all possible. It also causes more aggression on the roads because these drivers are often held back by slower moving traffic. This aggression causes more reckless use of speed, more tailgating, more red light runs. An angry driver is a bad driver.

Speed is a factor in all accidents. Think about it: you cannot have a crash if you and everyone else are stationary. Faster crashes are more deadly than slower ones. These are facts and I really don't mean to talk them down, but the primary cause of accidents is not speed itself. It is driver error and driver inattention (which is really in the set of all things that can be described as "driver error"). Thus the main way to reduce fatalities is to improve driver behaviour, not slow everyone down by force. I really want to talk about driver attention because this is the one that is hit hard by rigid speed enforcement measures, and is causing a lot of accidents that are actually put down to other things like texting, using a mobile phone and the like.
When a driver is forced by speed enforcement to travel slower than the speed he knows he can safely drive at under the conditions, something amazing happens: he gets worse. The attention needed to keep the car going in a safe way is reduced, so the driver will feel as if he has some brain power to spare. The mobile phone, the stereo, daydreaming, all of these things will start to appeal because it feels safe. We all know, because we have been told over and over, that using a mobile phone while driving is extremely dangerous. So why do people still do it? The reason is because it feels safe. And if something feels safe, who are the police to tell us not to do it, eh? Now, it may be safe to use a mobile phone from the perspective of brain power at the moment, but in the next moment there might be a hazard, where the driver's workload will increase dramatically, sometimes beyond his capacity, and a crash will occur. It'll be put down to him using a mobile, but the real cause is excessive driver workload. The second problem of all this is that to use the phone, radio, etc. the driver's eyes are directed away from the road, further decreasing the time to respond to any hazard.

All of that was by way of exploding the myths surrounding road safety. If you've read this far, congratulations, you're a star. Now I want to start talking about how real drivers in the real world can improve the safety of their own driving. We know it's not about the number your speedo's needle is pointing to, so what is it?

The attentive reader will have guesed by now that increasing driver attention is the fastest, most effective way to increase road safety. However, we cannot increase the attentiveness of every driver, more's the pity, so we need some other strategies that, once our own attention is at its peak, will allow us to stay safe even if other drivers are not.
To help with this analysis, let's have a look at the most common types of accidents. I got all of these from the ADTA's website.
1. Same direction, AKA rear end collision. Cause: inadequate following distance. Solution: increase following distance. Monitor the following distance of cars behind you. If they are too close, do what you need to to let them pass or move to another lane.
2. Adjacent direction, that is, failure to give way to traffic at a crossing or T-junction. Cause: oncoming cars obscured, carelessness. Solution: Do not assume that a driver waiting to turn into your direction has seen you. Prepare to brake if you see cars waiting to enter your traffic stream.
3. Opposite direction. Usually people turning across traffic misjudging the distance to the oncoming car. Cause: same as 2. Solution: same as 2. Stay alert and be prepared to brake.
4. Off path in a curve. Cause: understeer (due to excessive speed), object fixation (more on that later). Solution: approach unknown bends with a large speed safety margin. Keep eyes to the road ahead, not objects on the roadside.
5. Off path on a straight. Cause: inattention, failure to respond to hazards. Solution: use speed consistent with roadside visibility.

It should come as no surprise that the first 3 most common kinds of accidents result from the assumption that all drivers will drive perfectly at all times. When someone does something unexpected on the road this results in an accident if there is a nearby car that doesn't anticipate or see the action. This is why "anticipation" is one of the key safe driver skills. Most drivers will assume that a green light is 100% safe. This is not the case, since red lights are sometimes run even quite far into the cycle, and since no driver anticipates a green light to be unsafe, this often results in a very severe accident.

The other two accidents are harder to analyse.
My theory on 4 is that people will try to take a turn a little too fast, and either panic when the understeer comes, or panic that it "feels too fast", fixate on an object at the side of the road like a tree or power pole that they are trying to avoid, and as a result, hit it. This is called target fixation and it is extremely dangerous. Some bends have a very bumpy surface and this will dramatically decrease the safe cornering speed. Be alert for such changes in surface.
5 is most likely some sort of swerving incident from a perceived hazard, or simply driver inattention for such a long time that the car leaves the road partially and the situation becomes unrecoverable. It is well known that straight roads lead to driver inattention accidents, so arm yourself with this knowledge and stay alert on the boring stretches.

Now that we have some background on the types of accidents that are likely to happen to you and the sorts of thins that can be done to avoid them, we are in a position to put the skill set forward. This motorcycling website has done just that. Obviously some of the techniques are rider-specific because a car is dynamically not the same as a 2 wheel motorbike, but a lot of it translates.
I'm tired of typing so I'm going to quote en bloc. Here's what they have to say:

Emergency Braking.

Emergency Braking is an obvious survival skill. In a crash situation one needs to be able to scrub off speed fast to either avoid crashing into something or to reduce the severity of the impact.

A less obvious fact about emergency braking on a motorcycle is that poorly implemented emergency braking can itself cause a crash. In a crash situation in a car, locked wheels simply reduce the extent of speed reduction. On a motorcycle, locking a wheel (and especially the front wheel) is likely to cause the bike to go out of control and the rider to crash.

In cars of course we often have ABS which despite its reputation is not primarily to allow you to stop shorter, but to allow you to maintain steering control under emergency braking. The fact that it stops you a bit shorter is nice but the main accident problem is skidding into the obstacle.

Direction Perspective

The eyes play a major role in the control of a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, where you look is where you go and, to establish your direction perspective, the motorcyclist must use his eyes correctly. The way the rider uses his eyes also plays an important part in anticipating the actions of other vehicles around him and in the messages he sends to other motorists in conflict situations. Target fixation is also part of this. The rider who looks at the roadside furniture s/he is trying to avoid is sure to hit it!

I've kind of mentioned this one already. You drive where your eyes tell you to. This is below the level of the concious, so be aware of it.

Manoeuvre Anticipation

Anticipating what a vehicle is likely to do in a conflict situation involves a number of skills, many of them quite complex. Yet, looking at the most common motorcycle/car crash situations, the NZMSC discovered that there were a small number of anticipatory skills which, when carried out in a specific order, enable the rider to anticipate the likely actions of the driver, the movement, and speed etc of the car. Knowing this skill and implementing it enables the rider to get early warning of the actions of errant motorist and thus avoid impact with the offending vehicle.

No comment required.

Crash Survival

Sometimes, no matter how good the rider is, he will be invited to join someone else's crash and will be unable to decline the invitation. Where a rider crashes, there is a specific set of actions and reactions the rider can make that will greatly reduce the chances of being seriously hurt in the crash. A simple example is where the bike slides out from under the rider. In this situation the rider should always try to slide rather than tumble. This way he can see where he’s going, he can use his hands and feet to steer away from danger, and his body will not tumble with the extremities at risk of snapping as they impact with the ground or parked cars etc.

Some comment required. Obviously a crash in a car is very different from a motorcycle crash. Before the crash, try to steer into something soft or an area of open ground. It is better to drive into some field than stay on the road but hit someone who pulled out without looking. When the crash is over your lower legs will probably be broken, if it's a forward crash. Try to leave the car to avoid dying in a fire.

Risk Management.

A modern management tool in big business, risk management is the skill of identifying risks, calculating their severity, deciding whether one wishes to carry that risk and, if one doesn’t, how to counter that risk. Risk-taking is, to a certain degree, part of the motorcyclists' psyche, be it when riding a bike or having fun at the casino. But most motorcyclists are still interested in managing that risk. They do this by identifying the risks in riding (for example, the risks of riding fast in a specific location) and deciding whether that risk is one they are willing to take. Most riders, until taught this skill, do not even consider the risks involved in riding in any logical way. Either the risk is considered as a whole (the risk of riding a motorcycle) and, as a whole is too large to make an informed decision upon (and is thus filed in the Too Hard basket of the rider's brain), or is unfocused, in that riding in one particular location at an excessive speed is not considered as a speed pertinent to that location but as the speed "I normally ride at". When given some basic pointers on the ways to use risk management in one’s riding, the rider is, for example, more likely to be selective in his speeding and to take a sensible and considered approach to risk.

The advantage of risk management is that it is a process which is perceived by riders to be a professional process and a process that allows the rider to make his own value judgements in its implementation, such as the judgement of the extent of risk the rider is willing to expose himself too. Personal value judgements like these are amenable to change through social and peer pressure and, with the psychological make-up of the motorcyclist, the best safety improvements are achieved if the rider moves to a safer riding style voluntarily rather than through a legislatively-imposed system.

The same website has a whole article on risk management and I do urge you to go read it.

To finish up, all road travel invloves risk. Whenever you get into a car, you accept that risk consciously or unconsciously. Governmental campaigns to decrease "speeding" do nothing about the risk, just the severity of the accident. If we follow that to its logical conclusion, we should ban everyone from the roads to avoid road deaths. But we get in cars, and take risks, every day, because driving makes our lives better. We have a way to make it safer as well: increase driver skill. If we increase our own proficiency, and counsel our friends and family to do the same, we can dramatically reduce the risks to us and our loved ones, all while using speed safely as 99.9% of drivers do, every day of the week.

A little something about fuel economy.

Here's a simple question: which of the three pedals you see above is responsible for the most wasted fuel?

If you answered "accelerator", I have some bad news. It's not the accelerator, it's the brake pedal.

To find out why, we need to consider what goes on when you're driving along, and what the purpose of the accelerator and the brake are. The clutch pedal can be safely left out of the discussion for now, although it does have its own uses and misuses.
Most cars weigh something between 1000 kg (a tiny hatchback) and 2700 kg (an enormous 4x4). For the purpose of this illustration I'll deal with a 1700kg car. At 60 km/h this car will have about 470 kJ of kinetic energy. When accelerating to 60 km/h all of that energy has to come from the engine, and when you stop it has to go back in to the engine (engine braking), into the brake pads and discs, and to friction losses (drag, tyre rolling resistance, drive train losses). As it turns out, which of those three mechanisms you predominantly use to dispose of the energy is extremely important with regards to fuel economy.

How you accelerate does have some importance, of course. If you are willing to accelerate more slowly you can save fuel by changing up earlier. This reduces energy losses innate to all piston engines, that is, the back-and-forth motion gets faster and this constant change in direction causes some power to be lost. So even though two people might both end up at 60 km/h, with identical cars, the one that accelerated more slowly would have used less fuel over all, simply because less was wasted in gaining the speed. If both had perfectly efficient engines the slow accelerator would still be slightly ahead (on economy) because he had a lower average velocity, but of course the redneck would get home first.
At constant speed, all other factors being equal, they use the same amount of fuel because they have the same drag to overcome. At constant speed this is the only factor directly related to speed that chews through your fuel. This particular consumption is proportional to the square of velocity, so going a little bit faster actually adds quite a lot of wind resistance (double your speed, say from 30 to 60, and you quadruple the air resistance).

Now we come to the brake pedal.

When you apply the brakes, some of your kinetic energy is converted into heat, and is lost to the atmosphere. Heavy cars need to have big brakes, because these have both more friction to slow the car, and lose heat more quickly so they don't get too hot. It is possible to overheat most types of brakes if you use them a lot in a short space of time, such as slowing from high speed on a steep downhill, or driving around a track. This will cause their friction to decrease and they won't be able to slow the car as efficiently, leading, sometimes, to a crash. That aside, the important point here is that two people, one a redneck thrashing his car, and one a gentle old granny accelerating to 60 km/h in 30 seconds, have identical kinetic energy, all things being equal. So if they both push the brake pedal to come to a stop, both are wasting all the energy they used to get up to speed. All of that energy came out of the fuel in one way or another, so effectively they have both wasted all of that fuel.

Having realised this, what can be done? How can we waste less energy, or even better, recover some of it? The first part, wasting less energy, is possible in any type of car, and it has little to do with how hard you pushed the accelerator 4km ago. The main thing is to take some of the energy that might have been going into the brakes and place it somewhere where it can do something useful, sich as keeping you going along a little way. Most obviously, this means coasting. In gear or out, coasting will be converting some of the kinetic energy into that which is overcoming the drag of the car. You still lose the energy irrevocably, but it is at least keeping you going rather than being converted straight to useless heat. If you are in gear, you also have engine braking going on. This means that the energy the engine would normally need to turn over at the given revs is coming not from fuel but from the kinetic energy of the car or, on a downhill, from the gravitational potential energy as well or instead.
Recovering the energy completely is impossible, but partly, yes, that can be done. If you watch Formula 1 you may know of a system that was used a few years ago: KERS (kinetic energy recovery system). This is a system that uses an electric motor/generator to save some energy when the car slows and spend it out again for a quick burst when the driver wants to overtake another competitor. This type of system is perfectly feasible in a normal car providing that it has an electric motor and battery/capacitor to store the energy. As such, pure electric cars almost always have a system like this, and so do hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, usually called regenerative braking. In an ordinary car (that is, not F1) such a system is very helpful in stop/start traffic, because you can save some of the energy you used to brake and put it to use accelerating again. Slow moving traffic is notoriously wasteful purely because you have to stop and start again so much and hybrid/electric technology helps reduce this energy loss.

Ultimately, the most efficient way to travel will always be at constant speed in top gear, which is why you get much better economy in the country and on freeways than in traffic, even though the drag losses are much greater, but you can get close to that by being gentler in acceleration and braking, and as a result, you'll be safer too. Start slowing down a fair way before a junction or red light. Give the car in front a bit more room, especially if a car behind you is on your bumper. Use both brake pedal and accelerator gently. All of these things will make you a safer driver, and in all likelihood will get you home faster too, since arriving at a light when it is green at 20km/h will put you ahead of anyone who races up to it, stops, and then has to get going again. Hopefully you will have fewer accidents too, which means lower insurance premiums and less hassle. You may also arrive at your destination more relaxed. What's not to like?

Someone took my advice ... before I gave it.

Perhaps if I'd had the presence of mind to do a little more research before penning my post on what we need in cars, I'd have seen this example of a company thinking ahead:

We simply took a standard BMW Mini One, discarded the engine, the disc brakes, the wheels, and the gearbox. These components were replaced by four of our electric wheels, a lithium polymer battery, a large ultra capacitor, a very small ICE with generator (so small it almost fits alongside the spare wheel), an energy management system and a sexy in-car display module.

As you may remember my conception was that there should be one electric motor per wheel, no mechanical drivetrain, with power reservoir in the form of a battery. I did not consider the importance of supercapacitors in acting as a very short term rapid power sink and source.

Perhaps this is the time to mention a few things about the piston engine used in most cars and trucks. Its problem is that it isn't a very good machine for driving cars and trucks. That's why there are clutches and gearboxes, so that we can maintain driving conditions within the power band and not stray too near the 0 torque of 0 RPM. Furthermore, to provide the acceleration we desire they have to have a lot of power left in reserve, rarely used, and this makes them large and heavy. Electric motors have none of these drawbacks. They have plenty of torque from 0 RPM and can rev much faster than is usual for petrol engines. As such they can drive a car from stationary right up to a very reasonable top speed usually governed only by the rev limit. The only problem with them is that, obviously, the electricity has to come from somewhere. Trains and trams can receive power directly from the grid, but cars trucks and motorbikes will not be fettered by centralised power distribution. Therefore they must store electricity in some sort of battery or have on board electrical generation. Hydrogen fuel cell technology creates electrical power directly from the fuel, but it is also possible to use the old fashioned piston engine to generate power via a typical magnet and coil generator. Given the difficulty of storing hydrogen, and the expense of its componentry, and the fact that the petrol engine is here now and has the benefit of a hundred years of research and development and the monumental pile of research cash flow it has experienced due to the sheer number of cars produced, I believe it is the right tool for the job. Turbine engines would be more efficient in every way, but they are significantly more costly and given the expense already represented by the necessary electronics it seems to me that turbine powered consumer vehicles are perhaps beyond the reach of the average man.

The Mini mentioned in the story has a 250cc two-stroke engine, which seems odd since they're trying to prove that you can use this technology to save the environment and two-stroke engines have very dirty emissions. This does follow the principle, though, that you use a classical internal combustion engine to extend the range of an electric car, given that batteries do not yet provide the range of a petrol tank. I firmly believe that they never will. It will always take longer to recharge a battery than fill up a tank of petrol or diesel or, perhaps, one day hydrogen. We will never be able to store enough energy in them to consider pure battery power as an energy store for consumer vehicles, especially those that drive all the time, like trucks and vans. Some form of fuel will always be necessary; to think otherwise is silly. Removing and replacing batteries at some sort of battery swap station is also silly. That's going backward in techonological terms. When horses were all we had you had to change them when they were worn out, now they are talking of doing the same with batteries? How stupid. The average man will never go for it, so it will fail, no doubt in my mind about that.

So until the fuel cell becomes a cheap enough power source, we will be left with some sort of petrol- or diesel-electric system, and that is fine with me.

Indonesian Bridge Collapse

I'm sure some of my readers will have heard of the recent collapse of an Indonesian suspension bridge called Kutai Kartanegara. As an armchair civil engineer I wanted to see if I could work out something about why and how the collapse occurred. What failure of engineering could have caused the deaths of 18 people (and counting)?

First, let's take a look at the bridge when it was intact.

Seems to be pretty standard

We can see that it is a fairly standard suspension bridge design, with two towers taking the weight of the roadway in compression (probably made of mild steel), and cables attached to a pair of long catenaries forming the connections with the roadway itself. These would all be high tensile steel cable. To prevent the towers falling over, they have tension on both sides. A large box truss comprised of I-beams encloses the roadway. My guess is that it is there to stop the roadway from buckling in high winds, like what happened to the Tacoma Narrows bridge. A similar box truss runs under the roadway of the Golden Gate.

Close-up of the box truss that provides torsional rigidity for the roadway.

Close up, we can see that instead of more expensive braided cables they have elected to use single strand steel bars connected to the catenary via some sort of clamp. This is quite unlike the Golden Gate, which uses braided cables looped over the catenary.

The use of bolts and brackets to make the connection with the catenary seems to have proved fateful, since photos of the collapsed bridge show these connections are where the failure occurred:

Normally in suspension bridges of this type, the connecting cables, in this case rods, are meant to be redundant; in other words, if one fails completely, there should be enough strength in those around it to take the load while that member is repaired. In fact, the rods may well have been strong enough, but their connections with the catenary evidently were not. Because there was no redundancy in the structure, it was, sadly, a collapse waiting to happen.

On the day it happened there was maintenance going on. Without knowing exactly what they were doing it's hard to guess what the initial cause of the collapse was, but I think it would be something like this: judging by the way one of the towers has been bent, it experienced significant lateral force from the middle span. This is consistent with connections failing either on the main span on the side opposite the bend, or on the ramp side on the same side as the bend. Either way, failed connections overloaded the tower and caused it to lean, destabilising the remaining over-stressed connections and ultimately unzipping the entire bridge span.

So, seeing that the connections were the point of failure, how did they work and how, then, did they fail? From photos it is clear that some snapped right off while most seem to have snapped off one of the hinge plates. They seem to be constructed of two hinge plates held on by bolts to brackets at the top and bottom. these brackets engage with a plate at the bottom, which has a hole through which the connecting rod is bolted into it. At the top there is some sort of clamp that grips the catenary. The most common point of failure seems to be the hinge at the top of one of the plates. These types of plates are made of high tensile steel and cannot sustain much of a crack without failing. I thought we had learned from eyebar bridges not to make things like this on bridges, but apparently not. Without an insanely rigorous inspection and maintenance program these parts fail. Corrosion gets into the steel right next to the bolt and prizes open the part right at the weakest point in the structure. Add a bit of load cycling and one day it just snaps right off. The cracks that can be sustained by these parts are on the order of a few mm, and they are invisible from the outside, so inspection is just about impossible.

Media reports cite poor construction materials as one of the factors. Possibly - this is certainly a bridge built to a tight budget - but ordinarily the safety factor is so high that even rubbish materials will still stand the test of time. This didn't and as a result I find the accountant that selected the connectors at fault. You have to design and build for things like poor maintenance and substandard materials, especially in a place like Indonesia. Failing to take account of those things is as negligent as playing Russian Roulette with someone else's life.

We need a new type of car.

The title says it all, really. I've identified a gap in the motoring psyche that no manufacturer has successfully filled, at least here in Australia. Briefly, there is a problem with most cars on the market today. This is not about CO2, at least not directly - you see, modern cars are far too big and heavy.

Now I do admit, there are some seriously good advantages to this. Big, heavy cars these days are very well built, making them as comfortable to crash into a concrete pylon as laying down on a feather mattress. They also have a lot of space for passengers and luggage, and there's plenty of gadgets to entertain both driver and passenger. There is a place for these cars, yes. I like big, comfortable cars. But I also like small, nimble cars and it's here that manufacters have been forced, by consumers mind you, to be conservative. Even the tiniest hatchback has four seats (for mice, if you want actual humans you really do need a normally sized car, like a Focus). This obsession with seats got me thinking, why do we need them all?

Most of the time, you see, people are only driving themselves. Granted this is probably not the case with families and mum driving the kids to school and various extracurricular goodness, but by and large the commute is conducted solitary. So why do you need four seats? Much of the extra weight that cars carry these days is due to the size of the passenger cabin. If you could trim it down to one seat, with maybe a bit of a shelf for your briefcase, you lose nothing in the usefulness of the car for that particular purpose, and gain in many ways - lower cost of pruduction and of course less fuel are the obvious ones. The economics are fairly sound. You do lose some safety factors of course, but then on the commute you are not travelling at high speed most of the time, and if lots of people did this then collisions would be almost as safe as if everyone drove tanks. Why is the market not cryinge oute for this?

Well, with the theory in hand, let's have a look at some attempts over the last few years to create my vision of the perfect commuter's car.

This yellow electric car gets the concept just fine: a small car only for commutes, usually short distance. But where to begin. Today's car has to look good, and I'm afraid it's total failure for this one. Moreover, I really don't think three wheels is the way of the future. Stability is compromised.

Mmm, this looks nice, but I think that cabin would feel rather a lot like a coffin. Plus we're back to three wheels again. What was the allure of that to begin with? And of course there are any number of similar concepts.

Ah, now that's more like it. The Carver solves the stability issues of 3 wheels by tilting, which is very cool, but the complex engineering involved also makes it quite expensive. Why not just add a fourth wheel? Just a thought ...

VW developed the idea quite a ways in a 2002 concept car (right), and it really showed some of the advantages: 290kg weight would have made it insanely efficient. Unfortunately it was given a 1 cylinder diesel engine with no power so it was never going to go mainstream, and of course it was extremely ugly. I say again, for mass market appeal it has to look good and have a decent engine. 50 kW would get a 500 kg car going quite nicely, potentially as fast as 0-100 in 8 seconds which is right in the sweet spot for a nicely powered family car.

Fortunately for this piece, VW have recently had another go, and I like the look of this version a lot better. Firstly the looks are much improved. They haven't gone for a noisy, rough, stinking pollutin' diesel engine either: this is an electric car as you might have guessed. This makes it short range only but you can't have everything I suppose. At the moment it's just a concept but VW is working hard to get something like it into production in th near future. It probably won't be as nice as the concept, purely for price point reasons of course, but they will be putting something small and electric on the market in the next few years. I do believe there is a market for something this size with a small petrol engine though.

Ah, now, you see, three wheels doesn't cut it. Got that? Doesn't matter if they do tilt in a cool way. The centre of gravity is just too high. Build a proper chassis please, and put away the childish tilting. This is 2011, flying cars are only 4 years away and we have barely got the car safe and efficient for road travel, never mind flying. Go design a new hatchback or something.

Now that we've seen some of the ideas the motoring world has produced, here's my idea:
4 wheels, each driven by its own electric motor. A small petrol engine or gas turbine at the back for range extension, with a good sized fuel tank; this drives an alternator which feeds power to a small bank of batteries and the wheels. The batteries are kept at a constant charge of no less than 50%, thus extending the lifespan of these expensive components. When braking and hill descending the batteries are allowed to charge to maximum extent. All electrical motors and alternator and batteries are water cooled to make them lighter and more efficient. Chassis should be an aluminium monocoque or aluminium/composite. Finally the passenger cabin should have one chair, for larger versions perhaps two. All of this would mave for an efficient, light, relatively fast little car. Only one obstacle remains: cost. I suggest that road tax for single seater or dual seater vehivles be lowered. That would help with the barriers of entry and get more people into them in the first place.