Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Roger Basick and I'm Katie Blake. Spotlight uses a
special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand no matter
where in the world they live. A woman drives a black convertible over a
hill. Her hair flows behind her out of this open roofed vehicle. At
the top of the hill, the road bends around sharp rocks. The sea
crashes below and out above the sea, the sun begins to set. The
woman parks her car and looks out over the ocean. The engine of her
electric powered car is quiet. Its sound disappears into the wind. Cars are
everywhere. They take people to remote places. They take people to work and
to their homes. Usually these automobiles are powered by gasoline or petrop but things
were not always this way, and they may not always be either. Today's
Spotlight is on the history and future of the automobile. People have dreamed about
creating cars for a very long time. They wanted a way to transport people
and goods without animals, but it took a very long time to make one
that worked. Nicholas Kuno was a French inventor. He built the first car
in the late seventeen hundreds. It used steam to power its engines, and
it could drive at speeds of about seven kilometers per hour. But steam engines
were very large and they took a lot of work to run horses cost less
money. They could also transport people more quickly. Many other inventors tried to
build a smaller steam powered car that was easier to use, but cars did
not become popular until someone invented a different kind of engine. The engine that
powers many of the cars you see on the road today is called an internal
combustion engine. Many people helped to create the internal combustion engine, but the
first person to use it in a car was Carl Bins in eighteen eighty five.
Internal combustion engines are smaller than steam inche they use gasoline to fuel the
engine, and they can produce more power to push a car faster. This
new engine made cars more popular around the world, but for a long time
only the very wealthy could buy them. Cars cost a lot of money because
of the way people made them. One or two people made each car by
hand, so cars took a long time to make. Also, each car
was different, so they cost a lot of money to fix. But in
the early nineteen hundreds, a man from the United States changed how cars were
made. His name was Henry Ford. Ford was a car engineer. At
first, he made cars the traditional way, but he believed that he could
make them more easily. He did this by designing one car model that many
different people could help him make. He used simple parts, then his workers
simply followed the same design plan for every car. He even made the cars
all the same color. This let Ford produce many cars that were all the
same in a short amount of time. Ford's method changed the way industry works
aroused the world. He designed a system that made it easy to produce large
amounts of his product. He paid his workers enough money so that they could
buy his product. Ford made it possible for many people to buy a car.
Ford's most popular car was called the Model Tea. By the nineteen twenties,
Ford had produced over fifteen million Model Tea cars. Many other car companies
also used Ford's methods. Cars began to cost less money all over the world,
but the number of cars on the road also created a problem. Every
car needed gasoline for fuel burning. Gasoline worked very well to power cars,
but it also creates a lot of pollution. The number of cars made some
cities difficult to live in. People exposed to too much vehicle pollution develop problems
with their breathing. Burning gasoline also creates carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a
gas that leads to global climate change. Using gasoline was a great idea when
people started making cars. There were not many cars in the beginning, so
the pollution did not affect much. But to day there are more than one
and a half billion cars on the road. The success of the car has
turned gasoline use into a danger. Kate Brunton is a representative from Amber.
Amber is a Dutch car company that makes electric self driving vehicles. She spoke
to the University Network about the problem of gasoline cars. The problem is that
owning cars, especially cars deduce fuel is bet but there is no real choice.
It is bad for consumers because the cost of owning most cars is high.
It is bad for the environment. It does not work well. Most
cars spend ninety percent of their time standing still. Today, many car companies
are working to make cars that do not need gasoline. For example, many
large vehicle manufacturers have begun to produce electric vehicles Instead of burning fuel, electric
vehicles store energy batteris. For a long time, electric vehicles were not very
popular. They could not go very far or very fast. This changed in
two thousand and three with the creation of the Tesla Motor Company. Tesla worked
for many years to create an electric engine that worked as well as gasoline engines,
and in two thousand and eight they released the Tesla Roadster. The Roadster
was just as fast as a gasoline powered car, and it could travel over
three hundred kilometers on a single charge. Another newer creation is the hybrid vehicle.
Hybrid cars use technology from both gasoline and electric engines. Hybrids have gasoline
engines like normal cars, but the engines do not give power to push the
car forward. Instead, they give power to the battery. The battery makes
the car go forward. You do not need to charge the battery in a
hybrid car. The gasoline engine provides the power to the battery, but the
battery can power the car at low speeds, so the engine does not have
to turn on. Hybrid engines are smaller than gasoline engines, and they require
less gasoline to operate. Other companies have been expected perimenting with different fuels.
For example, it is possible to fuel a car with hydrogen. Many large
car companies are researching this new technology. Right now, it is difficult to
use hydrogen because it does not last very long. One tank full of hydrogen
may only be able to fuel a car for a very short time, But
people are hopeful that new technologies will help make hydrogen work in the future.
There are many possible paths for the future of the car. How we avel
has changed many times over the past hundred years, and it will change again.
It may be possible that there will be no single replacement for the internal
combustion engine in the future. There may be many different kinds of cars,
each with different fuels, or people may use cars less. Either way,
it is important to continue to invest in these new technologies. It is important
not only for the future of the car, but for the future of humanity.
Do you own a car, what kind of engine does it have?
Do you use buses or trains more often? Do you use motor bike or
a bicycle to travel? You can leave a comment on our website or email
us at radio at Radio English dot net. You can also comment on Facebook
at Facebook dot com, Slash Spotlight Radio. The writer of this program was
Dan Christman. The producer was Micchio Ozaki. The voices you heard were from
the United States and the United Kingdom. All quotes were adapted for this program
and voiced by Spotlight. You can listen to this program again and read it
on the internet at www dot Radio English dot net. This program is called
the History and Future of the Automobile. You can also get our programs delivered
directly to your Android or Apple device through our free official Spotlight English app.
We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye,