Driving the Future

A distinguished expert offers a dazzling preview of the cars of the future, while exploring the science and politics behind climate change. As the director of the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality, engineer Margo Oge was the chief architect behind the Obama administration's landmark 2012 deal with automakers in the US market to double the fuel efficiency of their fleets to 54.5 mpg and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2025. This was America's first formal climate action using regulation to reduce emissions through innovation in car design. Tom Friedman praised the new rules as the "Big Deal” that redeemed the administration's previous inaction. In Driving the Future, Oge portrays a future where clean, intelligent vehicles with lighter frames and alternative power trains will produce zero emissions and run at 100+ mpg. With electronic architectures more like that of airplanes, cars will be smarter and safer, will park themselves, and will network with other vehicles on the road to drive themselves. Offering an insider account of the partnership between Federal agencies, California, environmental groups, and car manufacturers that led to the historic deal, she discusses the science of climate change, the politics of addressing it, and the lessons learned for policymakers. She also takes the reader through the convergence of macro trends that will drive this innovation over the next forty years and be every bit as transformative as those wrought by Karl Benz and Henry Ford.

Margo Oge retired as director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality after thirty-two years with the EPA. She received Presidential Awards from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and numerous environmental and industry awards. She is vice chairman of the board of DeltaWing Technologies, which is creating a new passenger car based on the DeltaWing race car, and is a board member of the National Academies of Science, UCS, ICCT, and ACE. She has an MS in engineering from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and attended George Washington and Harvard Universities. She resides in McLean, Virginia.