Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ the manufacturers of such devices kept shooting ahead. In the last decade, 3-D printers have radically expanded their diet and equipped themselves for more serious work. These digital factories can now consume a variety of metallic powders and a broad array of composites. This increases their range. Their speed, meanwhile, has climbed up the exponential curve familiar to other digital technologies. Traditional carmakers are now using 3-D printers to create certain parts while leaving the rest of their mass-manufacturing process intact.

      When it comes to speed, 3-D printing cannot compete with the astounding production of a traditional assembly plant. The question is whether the 3-D printing process will be fast enough for minifactories to make money in niche markets—or if it will be fast enough in three or four years.

      DIVERGENT 3D’S FIRST car, which Czinger showcases at mobility conferences, is a sleek, purple sports car called the Blade. It has the curves of a 1950s-era Porsche, yet it weighs only 1,400 pounds. If it had a more modest motor, it could run more than one hundred miles on a gallon of gas. But the show version, built to wow motor-heads and car writers, sacrifices economy for performance. It has the power of 700 horses, and it can accelerate from zero to sixty in a blistering two seconds flat.

      The Blade is only a concept car at this point. Divergent’s business, Czinger says, will not be in producing and selling cars, but instead in leasing its manufacturing system—its software—to automakers big and small around the world. Even as 3-D printing grows faster, it will never compete with the productivity of mass manufacturing. But niche markets don’t require such speed or scale. Czinger estimates that simple printed cars with commodity engines will sell for $6,000 or so—not even a third the price of Mark Frohnmayer’s Arcimoto SRK. The plans for the Shanghai factory call for the production of nearly one thousand such cars per month. The number is minuscule by mass-manufacturing standards, but it’s an entirely different business model. If this approach takes off, Divergent 3D could become a global software platform for vehicle manufacturing. That is Kevin Czinger’s goal.

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       LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon

      The story of Los Angeles, like that of most cities, is a tale of changing mobility. Until the 1880s, LA was a small river town at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, fifteen miles from the Pacific shore. The few thousand European Americans who lived there had either made a harrowing transcontinental journey across mountains and deserts in wagons drawn by animals, or they’d taken extravagant detours in ships, some of them sailing twelve thousand miles around Tierra del Fuego.

      When trains from the east finally reached the town, they unleashed a wave of migration. In 1888, as two competing railroads, Union Pacific and Santa Fe, battled for the nascent Southern California market, a price war erupted. A passenger in Kansas City could travel all the way to Los Angeles for as little as twenty dollars, then ten dollars, and during one spectacular promotion, a single dollar. To these first travelers, this rolling conquest of an entire continent must have seemed magical.

      With the new railways, the West was tamed. Travelers simply stepped into a railroad car at Kansas City’s new Union Depot. Two or three days later, they would find themselves far beyond the Rockies, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, descending into a boomtown of palm trees and rolling surf, a city of angels.

      What wasn’t to like? Los Angeles grew, and a railroad heir named Henry Huntington avidly pushed it along. Huntington arrived in Southern California in the 1890s and promptly began to buy up streetcar companies. He extended tracks throughout the region. He also acquired an electricity company, which fueled his trains. Nearly a century before the word existed, Huntington was a master practitioner of synergy.

      He was also a visionary. He was in fact building transit for an immense city that did not yet exist. While he ran the electricity and the trains, the biggest money, he knew, was in real estate. The history of railroads made it clear that when tracks came through, the value of nearby land soared, turning scrub lots into premium parcels. So he bought loads of acreage, from the foothills town of Glendale and Pasadena all the way to Redondo Beach, and then connected them to his train lines. People who settled in those areas could ride his Red or Yellow cars downtown for work and shopping.

      It was a comfy racket for Huntington and a handful of other investors, but it was headed for a big disruption, similar in many ways to the one we’re facing now. The first automobiles showed up early in the twentieth century, and after 1908, when the affordable Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s new assembly lines, Angelenos embraced them. In 1911, to meet soaring local demand, Ford even set up a Model T factory on Seventh Street, in downtown Los Angeles. By the following year, one in every eight adults in Los Angeles had a car, more than twice the rate in such established cities as New York. Some of these new automobiles began to compete directly with Huntington’s streetcars. Jitney cabs trolled the streetcar lines, snatching away their passengers and collecting the same fee, a nickel. A century later, this same pattern is repeating in hundreds of cities, as commuters abandon buses and subways for car-sharing services.

      As Angelenos took to the wheel, downtown LA grew congested. The streets effectively became narrower because of the parked cars. They were also more crowded, because drivers then—just like today—roamed in search of parking. The streetcars, which still served the majority of Angelenos, were getting tied up in traffic. As Richard Longstreth describes in his study of LA, City Center to Regional Mall, the city council addressed this problem by voting in 1920 to ban streetside parking in the urban core.

      This raised vivid concerns. The Los Angeles Times warned that if people couldn’t park downtown, other competing downtowns would spring up, in lots of other neighborhoods, including Hollywood and Glendale. Those competing downtowns would sprout their own theaters and department stores, and with their cheaper real estate, they’d be able to offer parking. This would hollow out LA’s downtown.

      Within a decade, the new order was firmly established. Cars prevailed, and again, it was real estate that drove the change. Developers built in areas far from public transit, because now people could drive. Those who moved into those suburbs were self-selected car people. During this decade of tumultuous expansion, LA fleshed out much of the land between the bare bones of the streetcar networks. In 1927, the director of the city’s planning department, an auto buff named Gordon Whitnall, wrote: “So prevalent is the use of the automobile here that it might almost be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy … that our population has become fluid.”

      The alarming point about this transition, from the perspective of Angelenos who don’t want history to repeat itself, is that it just seemed to happen. From the perspective of everyday folk in the area, the process was simple: There was this new way to move. People liked it. And it promptly overwhelmed a large piece of the planet; in this case, Southern California.

      Peter Marx, a professor at USC and a former chief technology officer for Los Angeles, goes so far as to suggest that the automobile in Southern California is the dominant species, and that we human beings serve it. This is tongue in cheek, of course, but his logic has the ring of truth.

      Automobiles do seem to lord over us. We pay them extravagantly, and we polish and clean them—even though they tend to be lazy. Most of them labor for only a fraction of their existence, and they snooze the rest of the time in expensive lots and garages that we build for them.

      Human beings in Los Angeles spend thousands of dollars every month to park their own bodies, many of them in cramped studios and duplexes. The city has an urgent homeless problem, with more than fifty thousand of its people living without a roof over their heads. СКАЧАТЬ