Green is in

It’s been a decade or so since this writer began to cover the motoring beat. Since that time, we’ve been harking on the future that is to come. In good time, we’d argued incessantly, the internal combustion engine will go the way of dinosaur. Back then, of course, we had no choice but to agree that our predictions were years if not decades away from coming into fruition. Well, today it’s pretty safe to say that the dawn of that age has finally arrived. Welcome to 2012, the Year of the Water Dragon, where creativity and innovation are said to be the bywords to watch out for.

Not one week before the arrival of the Chinese New Year (which is by the way the day when we put this issue to bed), two very significant press conferences/launches were held. The first was for a start up company that aims to bring hydrogen power out onto our streets. We won’t delve into detail on that particular development just yet as we feel that it deserves so much more ink than what we have set aside for in this space. Suffice it to say, we see the arrival of hydrogen powerplants as a welcome development in these days of escalating pump prices.

The other welcome development was the arrival of the all-new Toyota Prius C, the compact version of the world’s most popular hybrid vehicle. With a full story devoted to the Prius C on page C-3 of this section, we won’t go into detail on it either. But this much we’ll say… it is without a doubt a car that will make people sit and think about it as an alternative. Given its P1.475 million price tag, it is by far the closest we’ve gotten to an affordable green vehicle. It’s not cheap, that’s for sure. But it’s not exorbitantly expensive either. Given its mileage numbers, it’s bound to make people think about its long-term cost vs. value proposition.

Prior to these two launches, we reported in these very pages over the past two weeks that there will be some significant new entries into the local car market that are bound to shake up the status quo. If you were reading intently, you’d have noticed that we dropped an important hint when we wrote about the Ford EcoSport. We mentioned then that the Ford’s Ecoboost technology could come with the said vehicle. Well, without spilling all of our beans, we’ll divulge this much… you won’t really have to wait for the EcoSport (which is a little more than a year away from arriving) to come across Ford vehicles with Ecoboost technology. The fuel-maximizing, performance-enhancing Ecoboost technology will make it to Philippine shores this year. We just can’t say in which vehicles just yet.

Also, the Philippine car-buying public will be delighted to know that there will be more than just a handful of Euro-5 compliant diesel vehicles that will make it to Philippine shores before the end of the year – some of them, award winning variants at that. With the development of common rail direct injection technology, many diesel vehicles are now being touted as even more earth-friendly than their petrol sipping counterparts. Expect these fuel-efficient vehicles to come in droves this year.

To top it all off, both the car companies and the peripheral industries (including those which rely heavily on peddling fossil fuels like oil companies) have been marching to the beat of a new drum – that of fuel maximization. If you’ve noticed, for much of last year, we came up with news bits on how companies have been working on educating people about proper vehicle maintenance and usage – all in the name of stretching one’s fuel mileage. That might seem strange for business enterprises that actually want you to keep spending on the products that they sell, but as we had argued earlier, the times are a-changing.

As we had stated earlier in this piece, this year even astrologers are predicting the rise of creativity and innovation. Given what the automotive industry is poised to bring into the country in 2012, it’s pretty safe to say that the move towards more sustainable and earth-friendly modes of transportation and practices starts here and now. We may have finally arrived at the start of the age we’d been harking on for about a decade now. Green is finally in.