Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

As a society, we're bound up completely in the use of the car, because it's one of our two most important forms of communication, the other being the phone. At the beginning of the 20th Century, very few people had either device. And those who did couldn't possibly imagine the effect they'd have on the world economy and the way we live.

Suburbs, for example, couldn't really exist without the car or the phone. These two devices created the 20th Century, in all sorts of ways; Autobahns led to Poland; the Volkswagen brand was a nationalist socialist proposal.

And yet, the technology in today's cars isn't really all that different from that of a century ago. Sure, the design's a bit better, but we're hardly driving around in hover-cars like so many science fiction writers said we would. The revolution of the car engine - the shift away from the internal combustion engine to something better - still hasn't taken place. So the hybrid represents a kind of interregnum.

Hybrid technology by definition doesn't strike me as being that coherent. I drive a hybrid car. I would sooner it was all-electric, but to create electricity you've got to burn oil. I'm getting a greater mileage than I did with my old car with its conventional petrol engine, and I'm probably making my local environment slightly cleaner. But ultimately I think hybrids are really just an articulation of our anxiety about climate change. We need to get to a stage where the major car manufacturers, such as Honda and Toyota, show a greater sense of urgency, and we haven't got there yet.

In spite of this, I'm cautiously optimistic. At the beginning of the 20th Century, no one could imagine the terrible disasters that were coming - the World Wars and so on - but they also had wondrous things to look forward to. Today, people like Jim Lovelock are shrugging and saying that humans will eventually die out and be replaced by other types of creatures. But things that to us sound utterly implausible are going to be commonplace. So, who knows? Maybe one day you'll be able to grow cauliflowers to power your Rolls-Royce. From desperation will come counterintuitive ideas, and they could include completely new forms of power.