Cars of today can’t get away being just cars
The Tokyo Show is for the general public and emotional men who love cars
more than women and other men. The show, which opened on Saturday will till November 6 see unusually tall Japanese girls smile obtusely and point at more spectacular models behind them. In the Makuhari Messe conventional centre, the future of passengers cars would seem indestructible.
From the Cube whose beauty is a matter of debate to the midnight black Maybach that does not permit much argument, they all lie festively on grand stands. Among these cars are several models that will soon arrive on Indian roads that suddenly seem even more unworthy than before. The research head of Nissan Motors, Mitsuhiko Yamashita would later tell this reporter polite smile, “How to improve driving experience in India. First, separate the humans, the cars and the cattle, please”.
Fortunately, the preoccupation at show is far from low brow concerns like how to drive in India. Automobile engineering today is about stretching high end
technology to final frontiers of imagination, within the laws of physics. The internal combustion engine, persistently bettered over the years, is becoming something like the umbrella- it can’t evolve anymore. So there is considerable concentration on design, fuel efficiency and, of course, safety.
Three days before the show opened, Nissan made a compeling offer at their research centre near Tokyo-“come and watch an accident”. In a large shed, two midsize models, Fuga and Tiida, were sent on head on collision at a relative speed of 100kmph. In a similar real-life crash the factor that often decides the survivors” fate is how fast they can be extricated from the crushed car and taken to hospital. After such an impact, doors are usually jammed tight, almost welded to the body of the car. But an old cordial engineer in uniform appeared in the shed and one by one, he opened all the doors of the Fuga and Tiida. This is one of the many features that Nissan will bring along when they finally enter India in a big way. “By 2010, we plan to have a strong presence in the country,’ according to its CEO Carlos Ghosn.
On the environmental front, it was refreshing to hear Ghosn sum up the enormous pressure on cars companies to conserve nature.”Today, if you are not working on a hybrid or fuel cell vehicle, you will look like a retard”.
But the triump of the greens was evident at the motor show. As Ghosn said, no car manufacture could afford not to show off their electric, hybrid or fuel cell vehicles, all inferior in the performance, cost efficiency and functionality to the internal combustion engine that is not going to die anytime soon. It may take another 15 years for fuel cell vehicles to complete with conventional cars. Electric cars will not become the dominant technology before 2030. Needless to say, Toyotas hybrid, ‘Pirus’, received a lot of attention from the visitors of the show but what Toyota put on the grand stage was the concept vehicle- ‘Iswing’: A one person car that looks like a reclining business class seat. When it moves among pedestrians, it runs on two wheels and on the road it moves on three. If constantly tries to remember the behaviour and preferences of the rider for future reference. It can comm.-unicate with other iswings and even drive each other through remote
control. “While this is obviously a concept car , we are working on incorporating the technology into our ma-instream vehicles,” an executive said.
A car today cannot get away with being just a car. In one of the stalls, Mitsubishi’s Colt Plus is opening its boot slowly. A robotic hand in the boot lifts a folded wheel chair and slowly places it outside the drivers door.
Clearly here, the cars that stand under the cunningly positioned lights, are cosequences of first world customers demands. It’s both fascinating and tiring to read through the long list of their features like headlights that move under the influence of thesteering wheel, vehicle Dynamic Control that steadies the car when it threatens to go out of the control, screens that warn of cars ahead and behind, and many other innovations.