Welcome to Spotlight Advanced. I'm Roger Bassick 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 petrol,
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 Cuno 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 up 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 engines, 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. First, he made cars the traditional way, but he believed
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 around the world. He designed a system that made it easy to
produce large amounts of his product, and he paid his work as 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. By
the nineteen twenties, Ford had produced over fifteen million Model T 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 developed 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 today 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 carsted use fuel is bad, but there's 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 in batteries. 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 release 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 experimenting 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 travel 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 a
motorbike 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,