The steak on the opposite plate was excellent: medium veal as I like, a touch of chimichurri from our gracious host properly peppered and seasoned, perfect. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that at my age, tucking into a steak before midnight is something I’ll have to give up and one hour earlier is fine. At the end of the steak event, the people at the table started the typical chat; Topic led to topic, thing led to thing and then came the discussion about the electric car. Shai, a dear friend and an engineer at Hesed Alyon claimed that the paradigm is going to change, he is right: today anyone who smokes in a shopping mall is considered a criminal and may suffer a heavy punishment, a few decades ago doctors smoked in the emergency rooms and it seems completely normal.
People smoked on planes, buses, everything was legal. But then the paradigm changed and smokers became strange creatures congregating outside airports that became a smelly fear. The paradigm is expected to change in the future regarding transportation and electric propulsion, without a doubt. In a few decades, whoever drives (my God, will drive another word that will probably disappear from the lexicon) in such a car that makes noise and emits dirt from a noisy pipe will be considered strange and unusual. Let’s assume for a moment if they ban such cars from moving on the roads and I hope not, but they will undoubtedly look very strange to the F generation or whatever letter they will invent by then. During the ongoing discussion, I found myself saying the word soul more than once: “Electric cars have no soul, they have no character.” But my voice was not heard and the subjects jumped on until I felt the fatigue falling on my eyes and that was my point to turn to the family hybrid and leave my house and my bed.
Closing an account: what kind of soul are you talking about?
In this column, I want to try and briefly list this term: “soul”, which probably comes up in every discussion between car enthusiasts and technology enthusiasts. What soul are they talking about? We will try to crack the foundations that build character – what defines a person’s character, and from there we will continue to cars. By and large, and without going into genetics, all humans (well, most of them) have two eyes, legs, no nose and mouth and in short all the organs. What builds the character of each and every one of us are the little things: the reactions, the look, the scratching of the nose not to mention poking, the small muscles in the face, running the hand through the hair, the smile and more. I think the point is clear.
In the era of electrification, which is a natural evolution of the worlds of transportation, there is an electric motor that functions very smoothly, there are no gearboxes, exhaust systems and other such mechanisms that exist in cars with internal combustion engines. Apparently, you drove one, you drove most of them (not all, there are exceptions) a kind of transportation melting pot where everyone is similar to everyone else at least in the aspect of driving and feelings. Now pay attention and be attentive because the soul is already coming. The cars of “once upon a time” had (have) endless parts, systems and engines; V engines of all kinds on a multitude of configurations and angles, blocks and pistons, there are four cylinder, three cylinder, 6 in column, 4 in column, rotary, boxer, cut off cylinders and more.
To this we will add the different gearboxes: manual, automatic, continuous, etc. There are also variable valve timings, different exhaust systems, bore depths, turbochargers of all sizes and compression ratios, in short hundreds if not thousands of different combinations, each of which creates a different character of A journey, of reactivity, of experience, of soul. A crappy, rattling engine with a continuous gearbox also gives character to the car. Sometimes it creates a brothel but that is also part of the game.
In the electric age, all this will disappear in favor of one very efficient, terrifyingly quick, less polluting, extremely powerful and bone-crushing engine, but it will be similar to the other, the difference will be negligible. We live in a world where the majority wants to be the best, the fastest, the most accurate but no, not me at least, not now. Getting from zero to 100 km/h in four seconds with electric cars is undoubtedly an exciting and powerful experience, on a personal level I prefer to get to 100 km/h in eight seconds when I fight the manual gearbox that is reluctant and not smooth, housed in a deafening sound capsule with a loud exhaust system , feeling the torque change with every gear shift, slamming back and forth with every gear shift, struggling with an engine that requires me to stay in high revs, give me that! For me, the road is more important than how fast I reached 100 km/h or covered a quarter of a mile. Unfortunately, in the electric era, zero to a hundred is less interesting, it’s synthetic, it has no soul, it’s hollow!
The electric age, I believe, will bring a different experience to future generations and less to us – it will bring with it different thrills, different goals that I who have tasted the pleasure of the power of the W engine have trouble fully understanding at the moment. The paradigm will change and I probably won’t be here (or I’ll be in diapers) to see it just like that coachman who competed in the horse drawn cart race at the beginning of the last century is gone today, just like that coachman who watched Karl Benz drive his strange machine around town and thought: “No smell The horse’s excrement and the noise of the hooves, this strange thing has no character, it has no soul. So the future is electric and it doesn’t matter what will feed the electric motor, whether a large battery, hydrogen or a small nuclear reactor, this is the reality and we should start getting used to it.
My dear friend, I have closed the debt to you.