Clean Technology and the Aroma of Emerging Opportunity

I'm writing this from Northern California wine country, where I've come for my annual infusion of hope.

No, it's not an alcohol infusion, though there's some decent vintage flowing. The hope comes from the conversations I've been having with a collection of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and corporate innovation leaders, at an annual gathering convened by VantagePoint Venture Partners, the cleantech venture fund to which I am an advisor. Each year, this event reinvigorates and reminds me why I love what I do for a living: The copious innovation and ingenuity taking place in the emerging green economy by companies both large and small.

This is no conclave of companies that are "going green" or "greening up." The businesspeople present here in Napa are at the center of a revolution that even some of them aren't yet able to clearly see: a mash-up of energy technology, information technology, building technology, vehicle technology, material technology, and water technology — and the products, services, and businesses that stand to transform our lives over the next decade or two, just as much as, say, the Internet has.

This is hardly the only cleantech conference I attend during the course of a year, but it's the only one that includes a frank and open discussion among a small group of big companies about their perspectives and strategies on cleantech and the green economy, and how they're addressing them. The participants aren't corporate marketing executives or even chief sustainability officers. Rather, the representatives of the global companies present have titles like Vice President, Strategic Planning and Development; Senior Vice President of Emerging Business; and Chief Innovation Catalyst. They are joined here by the founders of two dozen or so entrepreneurial cleantech companies.

As much as I love hearing from the entrepreneurs — each one's presentation offers a cram course in a technology or trend, as well as some innovative approach to addressing it — it's the big corporations that I find most interesting. The VantagePoint event is a rare opportunity to get past the marketing pitches and well-scrubbed executive talking points to hear the real skinny: how some of the world's largest companies are thinking about sustainability and harnessing it as an foundation for innovation.

It's nearly impossible to relate the full measure of the discussions, but I thought I'd share some tidbits about several companies, including a chemical company, a consumer products company, and a major retailer. The rules of engagement for this event are what's known as the Chatham House Rule — in essence, that the information discussed can be shared, but not the individuals' names or affiliations. The Chatham House Rule typically governs meetings where people want to share information openly and speak freely, but not beyond the immediate group.

First, the chemical company. For several years, it has been engaged in an aggressive effort to do with biology what chemistry can't do, creating products that are manufactured at lower temperatures and with far fewer toxic inputs. The company says it is pursuing what it dubs "unique, disruptive science with significant market opportunity." In the lab are a range of biofuels, biomaterials, bioadhesives, and more. For example, there's a carpeting fiber made from corn instead of petro-based nylon that requires nearly a third less energy and emits nearly two-thirds fewer greenhouse gases. It is being manufactured at a repurposed polyester factory. The demand is there from both consumers and corporate buyers, the company says, though pricing is a challenge: With oil prices down, the cost of nylon has dropped by nearly two-thirds over the past year, making the bioproduct less competitive than the petro-based one. Still, the company is optimistic over the long term. "We see many places where biology can win over chemistry."

Next up, the consumer products company. It has created a set of sustainability design principles for all of its thousands of products — "supported by sound and transparent assumptions, good science, and substantiated by data" — and has amped up its commitment to make these products with significant environmental improvements and no price premium to customers. And at the same time, it aims to reduce its overall emissions of carbon dioxide and waste, and use of energy and water, by 20 percent within five years.

Along the way, the company is asking the tough questions: Given that almost all of its packaging is petroleum-based, "How do we make packaging from alternative, renewable material" — and do so without adding costs? There are promising experiments — in one case, working with a Brazilian company to make plastics from sugar.

Many of these innovations are coming from new kinds of partnerships, in which it is working with others to find breakthrough green innovations. That's a new approach for the company, and one it views as its path forward. "Companies that don't adopt an open innovation approach won't be competitive in 10 to 20 years," says the executive. "You have to look outside your walls."

Finally, the retailer. It's probably not the one you think — this one hasn't been particularly visible in the green world — but its ambitions are significant: It wants to become the hub for your home energy needs. For this retailer, that involves selling a vast range of emerging products: electric bikes and scooters, maybe even electric cars; home energy optimization products, including both hardware and software that monitors your energy use and helps you control it; solar panels and other renewable energy products.

And services: shared-use vehicles, solar installation services, home energy audits, and the like. This retailer views a multi-billion-dollar opportunity in becoming the go-to place for homeowners and small businesses to save energy and costs and to buy and install cutting-edge green technologies into their homes and offices.

What these three companies have in common, other than their vast global reach, is a strong vision of where the world is going and what's needed to succeed in the coming years. They understand that markets are shifting, as technology inexorably marches forward. Combined with growing environmental and energy concerns and emerging markets around the world, it creates an unparalleled opportunity to manufacture and sell products with more benign inputs and outcomes. And they're doing this amid one of the worst economies ever, pushing forward with the understanding that tough times often create the best opportunities to advance breakthrough change.

Their efforts are buttressed by innovations coming from hundreds of start-ups that are creating the next-gen building blocks of the green economy — ambitious entrepreneurs, many with awesome track records of creating transformative technologies and companies. Some of them are here, sharing their innovations with their larger corporate brethren, both parties looking for the Next Big (Green) Thing.

There's a palpable sense of excitement here in Napa, as companies large and small sip cautiously the fine wine of emerging opportunity and inhale the delicate aroma of hope. For the moment, at least, it's intoxicating.

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The Future of Green Product Design

We're about a month away from our upcoming conference, Greener By Design 2009, and I wanted to share what's coming and why I think this will be an extraordinary event. I also want to share information about a limited number of unpublished deep-discount registrations I have available for a few lucky blog readers. (More about that in a moment)

Greener By Design focuses on the intersection of product design, innovation, supply chains, and sustainability — how both large and smaller companies are baking environmental thinking into their products and manufacturing processes in a way that makes products not just greener, but better. This year's theme, "Greener Products for Leaner Times," reflects the elephant in the room — the economy — and how companies are aligning green considerations with the need to make products cheaper, lighter, simpler, and more energy efficient.

Suffice to say, this is no mean feat, though part of the problem is perceptual. Most companies still view that designing and building greener products is a costly endeavor resulting in products that are inferior, either in quality or in their ability to be cost-competitive with their conventional counterparts. As we report regularly on GreenBiz.com (and GreenerDesign.com), this is no longer the case. Companies making everything from clothing to cleaners to chips are finding their way.

And it's not just small innovative companies, though many of them are leading the pack. According to a recent survey by the research firm Forrester, a large number of companies are developing greener products, looking at outside factors as well as who within companies are pushing for product changes. Eighty-four percent of the consumer product strategy professionals surveyed said that their companies have environmentally conscious or socially responsible products in development or on the market.

We saw ample evidence of that at last year's Greener By Design (click here for video and other highlights), with companies ranging from 3M to Nike to Xerox — as well as upstarts like IceStone and Method — shared their learning and insights.

That trend has only grown over the past year, as the twin pillars of environment and cost-cutting have led companies to accelerate plans, as Forrester found. Much of the pressure is coming from retailers like Wal-Mart, which itself is ramping up efforts to push suppliers to innovate, reducing or eliminating packaging, making products more energy-efficient, and reducing toxicity — without raising prices. Clearly, this is no longer a "nice to do." It is the future of product design.

This year's event builds on that theme, as well as on last year's success. It includes keynotes from green design master Bill McDonough and iconoclastic entrepreneur Tom Szaky of Terracycle, along with the kinds of panels you'd expect. But also things you wouldn't: a hands-on workshop on innovation, by the renowned firm Systemic Inventive Thinking; small, consultative "guru" sessions with designers and innovators, in which attendees can pose their own design questions and challenges; and an Innovators Showcase, with entrepreneurs doing lightning-fast elevator pitches of their creations. We'll also have products on display from the latest electric vehicle to a new machine that's about to be released across Whole Foods Markets that I can't yet describe. (Click here for the current agenda.)

One of the things that most impressed me about the audience at Greener By Design is the sheer diversity of professionals it attracts. In my opening remarks last year, I scrolled the job titles of everyone in the room across the screen. It was a remarkable assemblage: designers, brand managers, and supply chain professionals, of course, but also engineers, biologists, chemists, and chief marketing officers, among many others. It was that diverse and high-level mix that contributed to the event's success just as much as the program itself.

So, about that discount: Thanks to the generous, record sponsorship we've had this year — from Autodesk, HP, Steelcase, UL Environment, and others — I have a handful of sponsored conference passes for less than half-price of the going rate — sort of my Earth Day gift. I'd like to make them available first to loyal readers of this blog — first-come, first served, and there are only a couple of minor qualifications required for eligibility.

If you're interested, send a note ASAP.

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The Seven Sins of Greenwashing: Is Everybody Lying?

An updated version of the 2007 report The Six Sins of Greenwashing has just been released. And like its predecessor, this version offers sensational findings: of 2,219 products making environmental claims that researchers found in North American retailers, "over 98%" committed one of several "sins." The 2007 report identified six such sins. This year's edition adds a seventh.

I suppose that's what passes for progress these days.

First, some background. In 2007, TerraChoice, a Canadian research firm that operates the Canadian government's EcoLogo program, sent research teams into six category-leading "big box" stores with orders "to record every product-based environmental claim they observed." TerraChoice then assessed each of the claims to see if they passed muster — that is, that they were specific, substantive, and could be backed up with some reasonable proof points, among other criteria. All told, out of just over 1,000 products, "all but one made claims that are either demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences."

Late last year, TerraChoice repeated the process, though extended its reach: Its researchers were sent into retailers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. The track record was slightly better: 25 products found in North American stores were deemed "sin-free," says TerraChoice. The trends were similar in the other countries.

At first glance, those findings seem dire and depressing. But much like some of the eco-claims themselves, TerraChoice's report doesn't hold up to scrutiny. What's really going on here? Are manufacturers truly that overwhelmingly misleading? Is just about everyone out there pulling the green wool over our collective eyes? Or has TerraChoice set a bar so unreasonably high that even the most well-intentioned companies can't clear it, and lumped the imperfect claims together with the truly bad ones in order to make its point? In other words, who's greenwashing who?

Truth is, there's a little of each going on.

First, honor is due. TerraChoice has performed a public service here, calling attention to the fact that so many companies are making claims that are anything from fuzzy to fraudulent. The groundwork they've done here is invaluable, even if the conclusions they've drawn from it are, in my opinion, a bit misleading.

At first glance, TerraChoice's methodology seems reasonable. They put products making green claims through their filter that asks, in effect:

• Is the claim truthful?
• Does the company offer validation for its claim from an independent and trusted third party?
• Is the claim specific, using terms that have agreed-upon definitions, not vague ones like "natural" or "nontoxic"?
• Is the claim relevant to the product it accompanies?
• Does the claim address the product's principal environmental impact(s) or does it distract consumers from the product's real problems?

Products that failed to meet such requirements committed one or more "sins." As you can see, almost every product has done so.

Is the bar too high? Scot Case doesn't think so. "Manufacturers are doing a lot of great things," Case, the TerraChoice executive who headed the study, told me recently. "They are making significant advances. The challenge seems to be that their rhetoric is outpacing the actual improvements that they're making. So, we found all of these products — many of them make wonderfully specific, legitimate environmental claims. And they would be perfect, except that they want to take one more step and make an outrageous claim. And that's why the percentage of products that end up on the sinner's list is so high. It's because the marketers don't seem to know when to stop."

I asked for an example. "A product will make a claim that it contains 30 percent post-consumer recycled content," Case explained. "That's a good, simple claim. But then what they'll do is add on top of that that 'This is the greenest product ever made.'"

I countered that such a statement, should it truly exist, isn't an environmental claim so much as the typical hyperbole that is part and parcel of marketing of all types. It's akin to a mattress company claiming that their product is "Your ticket to a better night's sleep," or a beer company's claim that its product, "Tastes great. Less filling." It's not provable; it's just hype. Consumers are left to use their own smarts to discern the difference.

"I think that the challenge is that in this particular sector, we've got to be particularly precise with our language," responded Case. "Because what we're talking about are things that consumers can't see. When a manufacturer claims, for example, that their product is energy efficient, or that it meets the Energy Star standard, that's not something that I as an average consumer can test. When I'm walking the store down the refrigerator aisle, I don't have some sort of magic device to know if it's really energy efficient or not. So it seems appropriate that a manufacturer should be willing to provide proof and to make that proof widely available for me and other consumers."

(You can listen to a podcast of my entire conversation with Case here.)

Now, before we go further, it should be noted that not long ago, Case bought a refrigerator he believed to be energy efficient, but which ended up uising twice as much electricity as the manufacturer claimed. So, he's got some cold, hard experience here about misleading green claims. However, it sounds to me like he was a victim not of greenwashing, but consumer fraud.

But that's not what much of the "greenwashing" documented by TerraChoice is about. Some of it is about companies like SC Johnson, the maker of such venerable consumer brands as Glade, Pledge, Raid, and Windex, which has taken aggressive measures to reduce the toxic ingredients of its products and processes. Its Greenlist rating system — about which I've written in the past — has been systematically reducing the toxic ingredients and packaging of all of its products since 2001. Greenlist has won a bevy of awards, including honors from environmental groups and a Presidential Green Chemistry Award.

But Greenlist is a self-certified claim — that is, it has not hired an independent third-party organization like Case's to verify the claim. Thus, it's verboten — a "sinner," according to TerraChoice.

I asked Case about Greenlist. "It's a wonderful program," he acknowledged. But, he added, "The litmus test for whether a label was legitimate or not was quite simple: Can a consumer find out exactly what that label means?"

I suspect they can, if they conduct the same 10-second Google search I just did. The top result was a page on SC Johnson's website that provided as much information as I think any reasonable consumer would want or expect, with deeper links for those who want to know more.

The point here isn't to debate Greenlist or anything else. It's that, as I've pointed out before, a lot of what's called "greenwash" is in the eye of the beholder. What for some consumers might be a reasonable and meaningful marketing claim can be seen by others to be a travesty of justice. Sometimes the criticism is justified; often it's nit-picking.

I don't really know how many of TerraChoice's "sinners" amount to nit-picking. That's one of the ironic problems with the study: It lacks transparency and accountability. There are no products named, no sinners shamed. Are the "sins" detected by TerraChoice really all that egregious or, as I suggested last time, are the accused companies more sloppy than sinister? We don't know. Is SC Johnson as big a sinner as the toy company Case described that put its own green seal on a product because it decided unilaterally that wood was a greener choice than plastic? It's hard to tell. We are left with only the sensational factoid — ninety-eight percent! — and not the supporting evidence. We must make up our own minds whether to believe the facts, and what to make of them.

Kind of like some of the "sinners" TerraChoice is trying to fight.

No doubt, countless consumers, already suspecting the worst about companies' green motivations, will accept TerraChoice's findings as gospel — after all, it confirms their suspicions — not bothering to question what's behind them.

In the end, I can't help but wonder which is worse: the companies that aren't being fully truthful or transparent about their claims, or the consumers who will walk away from the green marketplace in frustration, dismissing all green products — the good ones and the rest — as cynical ploys by uncaring companies intended solely at separating consumers from their wallets.

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Earth Day, Green Marketing, and the Polling of America, 2009

Here we go again. In the run-up to yet another Earth Day, here is my third annual take on the bounty of polling data on consumer environmental attitudes that seems to hit my in-box this time each year. (See here for the 2007 and 2008 installments.) This year is no different. I've counted more than a dozen different surveys, market segmentations, and opinion polls since Barack Obama became president. By my estimation, that's a record.

I jumped the gun a couple months ago, marveling at how Americans continue to claim their environmental shopping cred, even during horrendous economic climes. ("Why do nearly all of the surveys seem so gushingly optimistic, even during pessimistic times?" I asked. I'm still scratching my head.) But those polls were just the leading edge of the 2009 data wave.

So, what do they all tell us? As usual, a little bit of everything. Consumers are both more willing and less willing to shop green than in previous years. Consumers care more and care less about environmental issues given the economic times. Consumers are willing and not willing to pay more for greener goods. You get the point.

But one thing remains fairly consistent across nearly all of these studies — and most of the ones I've reported on in recent years: Vast majorities of consumers say they have adopted greener habits in their daily lives, and shop for at least some products with a keen eye on their environmental provenance and energy and climate impacts. In other words: the marketplace is getting greener — way greener, if you were to believe the numbers.

You may wish to not believe them, based on your own experiences and observations. I certainly have doubts. Either way, here is a taste of what the studies are telling us about American consumers in 2009:

• Consumers are more aware of green issues and are finding practical ways to be eco-friendly while also saving money in today's difficult economic times, according to the 2008 GfK Roper Green Gauge study. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Americans say they know a lot or a fair amount about environmental issues and problems (up 7 points from 2007) and 28% often seek out environmental information (up 5 points). Seventy-six percent have bought energy-efficient light bulbs and 58% have purchased energy-saving appliances. Consumers are purchasing paper products made from recycled papers (72%), green household cleaning products (64%), and environmentally-safe laundry detergent (57%) despite the fact that they cost more. However, those who say the environment is a greater concern than the economy has dropped from 69% in 2007 to 55% in 2008.

• Nearly seven in ten Americans (67%) agree that "even in tough economic times, it is important to purchase products with social and environmental benefits," and half (51%) say they are "willing to pay more" for them, according to the 2009 BBMG Conscious Consumer Report. BBMG found that 77% of Americans agree that they "can make a positive difference by purchasing products from socially or environmentally responsible companies," and are actively seeking information to verify green claims. On the other hand, nearly one in four U.S. consumers (23%) say they have "no way of knowing" if a product is green or actually does what it claims, signaling a lack of confidence in green marketing, revealing what BBMG called a widespread "green trust gap."

• The number of Americans who say they almost always or regularly buy green products remains unchanged since last year — at 36%, after tripling the previous year from 12% in 2007 to 36% in 2008, according to Mintel consumer survey data. Cost remains an impediment to the green market's growth. Mintel found the majority of adults are willing to pay "only a little extra" for green products.

• More shoppers in North America, Europe, China, and Japan systematically purchased green products in 2008 than in 2007, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group. In the United States, 16 percent of consumers — one in six — were systematic shoppers for green products in 2008. Some 61 percent said the environment is in a very bad state.

• Americans currently have a higher skepticism "about mainstream reporting" on climate change than at any other time in the past decade, according to a Gallup poll. As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%. Six in 10 Americans indicate that they are highly worried about global warming, including 34% who are worried "a great deal" and 26% "a fair amount." Overall worry is similar to points at the start of the decade, but is down from 66% in 2008 and 65% in 2007.

I'll be the first to tell you that some of this stuff is hard to report with a straight face. For example, according to Roper:

72% of parents discuss the importance of protecting the environment with their children on a regular basis (up 11 points from 2007). Not only are more American families having the "green talk," they are also emphasizing actionable issues. More are discussing recycling (86%, up 3 points), conserving energy (79%, up 5 points) and conserving water (76%, up 7 points). . . . Additionally, 88% of parents say they teach the importance of protecting the environment to their children by example (up 6 points from 2007).

Call me a cockeyed cynic, but I have a hard time believing that eight in ten parents are teaching their kids about saving energy and water, and that nearly nine in ten preach to them about "protecting the environment." (If it was the other way around — kids teaching parents – I might be more inclined to believe it.)

It's also hard to find solace in some of the rosier findings — for example, that 82 percent of Americans say they're still buying green products despite changes in the economy, according to EnviroMedia Social Marketing, or the 2009 Cone Consumer Environmental Survey finding that 34 percent of American consumers indicate they are more likely to buy environmentally responsible products today and another 44 percent indicate their environmental shopping habits have not changed as a result of the economy — when you also learn how utterly confused consumers are about what and who to trust. For example, according to BBMG, Wal-Mart was simultaneously named by consumers as the most and the least environmentally responsible company:

When asked unaided which companies come to mind as the most socially or environmentally responsible companies, 7 percent of Americans named Wal-Mart, followed by Johnson & Johnson (6%), Procter & Gamble (4%), GE (4%), and Whole Foods (3%). Wal-Mart also topped the list of the least responsible companies (9%), along with Exxon Mobil (9%), GM (3%), Ford (3%), Shell (2%) and McDonald's (2%).

And the kicker:

Interestingly, 41% of Americans could not name a single company that they consider the most socially and environmentally responsible.

Any questions?

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Reinventing Mobility: It's Not Just the Cars, Stupid

For all the aiding and abetting taking place on behalf of the automobile industry — the transfusions, the transformations, and the TLC — one thing remains constant: It's all about the cars. The quest, as just about everyone sees it, is to figure out how Detroit automakers and their global competitors can build smart, compelling, and reliable vehicles that appeal both to our pragmatism and passions — and do so profitably and more ecologically. That's the basic drill, right?

Well, maybe not. The near-obsessive focus on building greener vehicles — just about every global auto maker is now in a drag race to create an electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid — obscures the bigger challenge, and the bigger opportunity: to reinvent our personal transportation systems in ways that are better in every way — economically, socially, and environmentally.

Consider: It's become dogma in the United States and other developed and developing countries that "Cars give us freedom." Entire generations of Americans have been reared on that assumption. Detroit was built on it.

But cars are a burden: You have to purchase them, maintain them, fuel them, park them, and insure them. If you live in a city and lack a garage, the challenges and costs multiply. They're expensive and a hassle, and they sit idle 95 percent of the time. When you actually use them, there's the challenge of getting around on ever-congested streets and highways. Not exactly "freedom."

What gives us freedom isn't cars, but mobility, the ability to go where and when you want in the way that's most appropriate and affordable for your needs and style. That's true at every point on the economic spectrum. Indeed, in emerging economies, mobility is a prerequisite to sustainability. When people can move freely from hither to yon, they're better able to have a job, trade goods, seek an education, obtain health care, perhaps even explore other places to broaden their horizons.

So, why, in the digital age, when just about every product and service is undergoing fundamental change, if not outright reinvention, is our transportation future still rooted in the mode of manufacturing and selling cars, electric or otherwise? Why aren't the titans of industry reimagining the larger system in which these vehicles operate? As we try to reinvent the auto industry, shouldn't that be part of the equation?

Dan Sturges thinks it should be. "There's a role for auto companies if they stop focusing on making cars and start thinking about enabling people to move."

Sturges has taught me a great deal about mobility, a subject about which he's both extremely knowledgeable and passionate. A former car designer for General Motors, Sturges now focuses on developing community-improving transportation systems — how to marry an array of personal vehicles with public transit while leveraging the latest in digital telecommunications to create integrated and efficient mobility systems. As an entrepreneur, Dan led the effort to invent the first mass-produced neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV), the GEM car, now owned by Chrysler. These days, Sturges is the visionary behind Colorado-based Intrago, a company that makes "size-appropriate transportation options for people to move about local environments." (Full disclosure: I'm on Intrago's advisory board.)

In Sturges' world, all the talk about alt-fueled vehicles — whether from the major automakers or any of the dozens of start-ups, from Apterra to Zenn — is necessary, but hardly sufficient, especially if cities are too congested for these vehicles to get around. That inefficiency is already apparent, he says. "Here in Denver, we have an average 1.1 people occupancy per vehicle. That's a 20 percent load factor. An airline cannot stay in business a week at a 20 percent load factor." And yet, says Sturges, our national conversation on environmentally responsible transportation has us simply transfering all of that inefficiency over to electric vehicles instead of gas-powered ones. The result is a lot of energy wasted to move all those empty seats. Moreover, he says, studies have shown that in some cities as many as 40 percent of the vehicles on the streets are driving around looking for parking. Simply switching to electricity, even from renewable sources, to power all those underutilized vehicles trolling for a place to park won't get us very far, in terms of our energy and climate goals.

So, we'll need not just new types of vehicles, but new types of vehicle systems.

We're seeing some of this already. There's Zipcar, City Car Share, I-Go, and other forms of car sharing and mircorental services, which provide alternatives to car ownership. In Paris, there's Véllib, the system of 20,000 rental bikes and 1,500 automated stations — roughly one every 300 meters throughout the city center — which affords members with low-cost bike rentals (the first half-hour is free) that can be returned to any station. In Ulm, Germany, Daimler has launched Car2Go, a similar system using small NEVs. As the company describes:

The principle is simple yet brilliant: Whenever you need a car, you can book (spontaneously or in advance) one of 200 car2go that are in Ulm. With a minimum amount of effort, an almost free choice of return location, and without fixed costs. That represents modern mobility for us, which improves the quality of life, and sets Ulm in motion.

Vélib, Car2Go, and the car-sharing services represent parts of the larger system Sturges envisions. "Once you start to see the congestion issue, then you can have a discussion of how can we reinvent or rethink the way that we move. And at that point it gets really interesting. This digital revolution — the thing that's enabling the car sharing and enabling our iPhones to become hitchhiking tools — is a really exciting new world, where this three-dimensional web is unfolding around us."

In that three-dimensional web, you might not own a vehicle, but have access on demand to whatever style and size you need — a small NEV for a quick jaunt to the market, a minivan for a family vacation, a slick sedan for a client meeting, a convertible for a nice day, a sturdy pick-up for a trip to Home Depot. The cars might be delivered to you or be available within reasonable proximity of where you need it. The rental rate might adjust based on time and convenience: If you need a vehicle delivered to your door within 30 minutes you'll pay a higher rate than if you're more flexible about where and when you get it. Of course, all of this is as simple as tapping an icon on your smart phone, texting a request, making a call, or showing up at a kiosk.

And it's not just cars. In the "smart multimodal transportation future," as Sturges calls it, there's a world with a diverse array of transportation choices, from shared electric bikes and scooters to private vehicles of all kinds. (Intrago, Sturges' company, offers technology to create such personal vehicle networks.) "You jump from one mode to the next mode," he says. "The future urban traveler we see is more like Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine." You already do that when you take an airplane trip: You drive or take public transit to the airport, fly to another airport, then "swing" to whatever mode of transport is appropriate and affordable to take you wherever you're going. In Sturges "Tarzan" world, we'd do that locally, too. The result: We'd get there with less wear and tear on ourselves and the planet, and maybe faster, too.

The thing is, it makes economic sense. According to AAA (Download - PDF), the typical midsized car costs about $23 a day — every day, 365 days a year — when you factor in a gas, maintenance, tires, insurance, license, registration, depreciation, taxes, and finance charges (assuming driving 15,000 a year). At that rate, your basic two-car garage runs a cool $16,500 a year. Cutting that in half to own just one vehicle can still leave more than enough to afford all the vehicle sharing and mobility services — even taxi rides — that you need.

Of course, there's a cultural mind shift needed for all this to happen. What will it take for consumers to give up one of their family cars? Could owning fewer cars become a status symbol? Could we reach a point where not owning any car is the ultimate in luxury? That cultural challenge seems nearly as big as the technological ones.

And can the big guys — the General Motors and Chryslers — play in this new world of transportation services, or will their laser-like focus on selling cars lead them to become dinosaurs, even if they survive their current travails? I asked Sturges if the Big Three would be really able to turn the ship toward this new direction. "There is so much talent in Detroit," he replied. "I don't think you need a new ship. You've got all kinds of engineering resources and really bright people. But they'll need less of a focus on selling cars, and more of a focus of enabling people to move. They need to move off the idea that people need one car that can go everywhere and do everything. But I don't think you have to throw the whole thing out. I think you just have to be imaginative."

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