Transportation Evolution Quotes

Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.

We're making this analogy that AI is the new electricity. Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing.

There will never be a time when the old horse is not superior to any auto ever made.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

The market will evolve into two segments: cars that provide ease of access to transport and are shared by many people, and cars that are exclusive, high-end symbols of the owner's status and aspirations.

In the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car. Actually, the dark horse in that race was internal combustion, but because of the energy density of gasoline and discovery of oil in large amounts at that point in first Pennsylvania and then Texas, it won out over those other two, to the point that those other two are actually viewed as obscure footnotes in history.

The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.

I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

The ordinary horseless carriage is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.

Car ownership as we know it will change. The promise of car ownership of the past, the freedom of open roads... the reality has been more of a burden.

This is the beginning, and the dawn of a new era of transportation.

Mark my word - A combination airplane and motor car is coming.

The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship.

The car was the iPhone of the 20th century. Kids these days don't have to drive anymore. They just go there virtually.

My first trip to China was 1990, and that was in a world where there were virtually no cars at all on the road, and everybody had bicycles.

Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.

Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.

People say there's delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you're home.

The experts or the cynics say, "Oh, those were the good old days, that's when drivers were really drivers. They didn't have all these aids." You know what? What we had, we did the best with and when we got more we provided what was needed.

Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

Sure, jets are fast and economical, but, oh my, what fun we've lost and what leisure we've sacrificed in the race to efficiency. Somehow, stepping onto a plane and zooming across the United States in a matter of hours doesn't hold a candle to the dear, old-fashioned train ride.

I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.

One of the reasons I wrote 'Airborn' was that I'd fallen in love with the great passenger airships which flew in the '20s and '30s. Their time was short-lived. They were frail, they tended to crash; and they could never be as fast, safe and efficient as the airplanes that replaced them.

The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.