In Favor of Moore’s Law for Cars

Most of us are familiar with Moore’s Law. It is manifested in many ways in the computer world. The speed of computers doubles every three years. The amount of storage doubles in about the same time. It governs the number of transistors on a chip. I heard a talk last year by an executive from Intel, the company that makes most of the computer chips. He said that they could actually exceed Moore’s Law in developing new computer chips, but were restricted by company policy not to exceed it so that they could sell their inventory before they were made obsolete by the new advanced chips.
This last week there has been a lot of talk about President Obama’s new automobile standards. Now that the government is in the automobile business, maybe it will actually make a difference. Remember the mid-eighties when we had a Pontiac 6000 and a Nissan Stanza? Both of them got thirty miles per gallon on the highway. The reason they got thirty miles per gallon, incidentally, was because of government standards imposed after the oil embargo years of the early eighties.
What if Moore’s Law, instead of government standards, applied to cars? Since 1985 we have had eight cycles of Moore’s Law. Computer capacities have increased by 28, or 256 times. If cars had kept up with Moore’s Law, they would get 7680 miles per gallon on the highway. The catch, however, is that our cars would be crashing all the time through no fault of the driver. If a car ever had problems the way to fix it would be to pull off the road, close all the windows, and re-start it.
An interesting footnote to this essay is that the price of computers hasn’t changed. Each year or so since the eighties the big computer companies have come out with a new model home computer for about $2000. It is actually a little less than that now. What has happened in the same time to car prices? In the mid-eighties a new car cost about $10,000. Computers have gotten 256 times better without getting more expensive. Cars have gotten 2.56 times more expensive without getting any better.