Diverging Lanes

Most people may know Divergent as the poor-tween-girl's Hunger Games, but it's also the name of the latest automotive startup determined to shake-up the car industry. I know, lately innovation in the car business has been as repetative and predictable as, well, Young Adult distopian fiction. But this Divergent isn't just another Tesla wannabe promising a cheap, self-driving electric car, funded by questionable financing. They actually showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show with a gas-guzzling, drive-it-yourself sports car.

(As an aside, it only now dawns on me that we're going to have to come up with a retronym for non-self-driving cars.)

Divergent is going to revolutionize the auto industry by changing the way cars are made. Specifically, they want to bring 3D printing to the business. That's not new; there have been 3D-printed cars on show for the last few years. But those tended to be home-built monstrosities that don't look ready for prime time. But Divergent has a process for forming metal that produced parts that look like real car parts.

And that brings us to their second innovation. They don't really look like ordinary car parts: they look significantly better. 3D printing parts opens up far more freedom to shape the parts in ways that weren't possible before. So they're combining it with computers "evolving" the shape of the parts into an optimum shape that produces the needed strength with minimum weight.

This automotive journalist is overjoyed about the Divergent concept car, largely because it's finally a big car revolution that doesn't involve taking the wheel out of our hands.

That's not such a big concern for me. Unlike most car fans, I'm not really dreading the disappearing ability to drive for oneself. Since most of my car fandom is expressed vicariously through video games and journalism, I'll be fine commuting in an automated appliance as long as I can do so while playing Gran Turismo 16 and neural-downloading a Car and Driver article about billionaires racing their no-longer-street-legal Lamborghinis at an exclusive track in Dubai.

Having said that, I'm not really excited for self-driving cars. For all the social transformation, there's a surprising amount that won't change. For one thing, most of automotive manufacturing won't be effected. As a rate environmentalist/car enthusiast, I would have been reluctantly okay with sacrificing cars as we know them to eliminate global warming, but we actually face a worst-of-both-worlds scenario where we make cats boring, but don't get an environmental payoff.

And now that more people are thinking seriously about a self-driving future, they're starting to see the potential downsides. This may sound cryptic, but rather than change the world, self-driving cars may make the world more like it already is. That is, it could make a couple of the unfortunate features of modern life worse. Take commuting. It's unfortunate for families, urban culture, the environment that people are willing to commute huge distances for work. But self-driving cars could greatly enlarge the problem. If you don't actually have to be awake for the drive, that opens up even bigger distances. You may as well live a two-hour drive away from work so you can fit an entire movie in the commute.

But if you're going to spend such a long block of your day with no responsibilities, why not get some work done? Another unfortunate social development is the always-on-call work day. If everyone is just sitting around for an hour or two before and after their shift at the office, it won't be long before it's expected that you're working there too. After all, there's enough pressure to stay in contact with the office in the car now. Imagine how it will be when you don't have the excuse that you're busy piloting two tons of steel through suburbia.

Electric cars are a less exotic technology, though it will probably have a bigger impact on the industry. Get rid of the gasoline engine and you also remove the fuel tank, transmission, radiator, and Big Oil. Yet, the measure of electric cars' success has always been its similarity to gasoline. Does it have the same range, can you fill-up as fast?

Divergent, may be giving us boring things we already have - car parts - but in a revolutionary way.  I reported on evolved designs and 3D printing last year, hopeful that it would change the way our world looks and works. It could give us quantifiably better cars, subjectively better looking products, and upend manufacturing.  Really, that could be a bigger change, or at least, a more exciting change.