Stewart Brand

So a lot of maintenance.

Well, partly it's because the products are lower and lower maintenance.

And so you don't have occasion, like you did with the Model T, to constantly having to redo things.

Putting in grease, putting in oil, cleaning up this, cleaning up that.

One of the interesting things is that electric cars, when they first were built back around 1900, were very low maintenance compared to the gasoline cars.

And that was a major attraction among many other things.

Then gas went out because they could go longer distances, and there were oil discoveries in the US and so on.

But then once Tesla came along, once again, people realized, wow, these electrical vehicles have way, way less maintenance.

uh and their energy efficiency is enormously high uh whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine as they say uh it spends most of its energy just getting out of its own way so uh that

That efficiency of energy and efficiency of maintenance is part of the story of progress.

You see that also in the ways that we have dealt with corrosion, with rust over the years.

There's a whole story of that in my book about how

From way back, like 4,000 years ago, people have been trying to make a kind of a steel that doesn't rust.

The problem with steel is that, or iron, is that the...

When it oxidizes into rust, that's a bigger molecule than the straightforward iron or steel molecule.

And so it puffs up and then falls off and exposes more.

It's not protecting against future rust.

So that became a big quest, and finally stainless steel was discovered.

With enough chromium, you can make it so that there's an oxidized layer of chromium on there that does protect the steel.

You still have to be careful.