The average new car gets fewer miles to the gallon than Henry Ford’s Model T got. OTTO STEININGER

On September 29, 1993, President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, the chief executives of G.M., Chrysler, and Ford, and the head of the United Auto Workers gathered in the White House Rose Garden to talk about cars. Clinton opened his remarks by reminiscing about his first—a 1952 Henry J that his stepfather had salvaged from a fire—and then about one of his “most prized possessions”: a 1967 ice-blue Mustang convertible. “I think when I left my home it was the thing that I most regretted leaving behind,” he said of the Mustang. “The other people who drove on the roads in my home state, however, were immensely relieved.

“I think that all of us have our car-crazy moments and have those stories,” Clinton went on. “Today, we’re going to try to give America a new car-crazy chapter in her rich history—to launch a technological venture as ambitious as any our nation has ever attempted.” The aim of the venture, the President explained, was to “develop affordable, attractive cars that are up to three times more fuel-efficient than today’s cars.” In addition to being moderately priced and energy-efficient, the new cars were supposed to be safe, comfortable, and recyclable. The automakers and the federal government would design the vehicles jointly—the government would provide much of the funding, and make available technologies that had been developed for military use—with the understanding that at the end of a decade the manufacturers would build prototypes of sedans capable of getting eighty miles to the gallon.

The project was formally known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, and early reports from those involved were promising. By 1997, participants had settled on the specs of the “super car,” as it became known: the sedan would be a lightweight, diesel-electric hybrid. (Diesel engines, because they use a higher compression ratio, consume less fuel per mile than gasoline engines do.) By 2000, the Big Three had all produced concept cars, which were unveiled with much fanfare at the North American Auto Show, in Detroit. G.M.’s car, which was called the Precept, came equipped with two electric motors, one mounted on each axle. Ford’s Prodigy featured an aluminum body and rear-facing cameras in place of side-view mirrors, and the Dodge ESX3 was made in large part out of plastic.

The concept cars were wheeled out, then wheeled away, never to be seen again. In January, 2002, just months before the prototypes of the vehicles were supposed to be delivered and after more than a billion dollars of federal money had been spent, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that the Bush Administration was scrapping the project. When he delivered the announcement, Abraham was flanked by top executives from the Big Three, at least one of whom—G.M.’s chairman, Jack Smith—had stood next to President Clinton when he launched the program, eight years earlier. Abraham explained—and the auto executives seemed to agree—that the program had been based on a fundamentally flawed premise. The future of the car didn’t lie with diesel hybrids or any other technology that would allow vehicles to get eighty miles to the gallon. “We can do better than that,” Abraham declared. The Administration and the automakers, he said, were undertaking a new, even more ambitious venture, called FreedomCAR. The goal of this project was to produce vehicles that would run on pure hydrogen.

So will a “super car” or a “FreedomCAR” or a “hypercar” or any of the other revolutionary new cars that have been proposed ever get built? Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, the authors of “Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future” (Twelve; $27.99), answer this question with a qualified “yes.” Carson, who covers the transportation industry for The Economist, and Vaitheeswaran, a writer who holds an engineering degree from M.I.T., are “techno-optimists,” as opposed to the “eco-pessimists” they sometimes deride. Yet their argument rests on an account of global trends that is nothing short of terrifying.

Consider what’s happening in India and China. As Carson and Vaitheeswaran point out, car ownership in both countries has been and still remains, by U.S. standards, almost absurdly low. There are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and eleven for every thousand Indians, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans. But incomes in the two countries are rising so rapidly—the Chinese economy grew by eleven per cent last year and is expected to grow by the same amount this year—that millions of vehicleless families will soon be in a position to buy automobiles. Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions. (To satisfy increasing demand in India, the country’s second-largest auto manufacturer, Tata Motors, is set to start producing a four-door known as the one-lakh car—a lakh is a hundred thousand rupees—that will sell for the equivalent of twenty-five hundred dollars.) Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day. It’s difficult to imagine how such enormous quantities of oil could be found, but, if they could, the result would be catastrophe. “Just consider the scale of the potential problem—for instance, the effect on global warming of seven hundred and fifty million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide,” Carson and Vaitheeswaran write.

It’s tough for Americans (or, in the case of Carson, a Scotsman) to argue that, for the sake of the planet, citizens in developing countries shouldn’t buy cars. It’s very nearly as tough to imagine Americans deciding, for the sake of the planet, to give up driving. Since the planet can’t handle ever-increasing numbers of gasoline-consuming, CO 2 -emitting vehicles, it follows, Carson and Vaitheeswaran argue, that a radically new kind of car will have to be invented. They aren’t particularly clear on how this car will work—they are keen on a number of (mostly unproved) technologies—or on who, exactly, will develop it. But they are convinced that once the right steps are taken—Carson and Vaitheeswaran advocate a stiff carbon tax, and urge Americans to support any politician with the courage to propose such a measure—it will appear. Indeed, they maintain that the “race” to create the “car of the future” is already under way.

“The good news is that a promising suite of technologies—ranging from flex-fuel ethanol engines to plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel cells—finally offers a way to move beyond oil and the internal combustion engine,” Carson and Vaitheeswaran write. In keeping with their book’s generally upbeat mood, the two manage to tell the story of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles as a kind of automotive comedy. Japanese automakers, excluded from the project, mistakenly took Detroit at its word. They assumed that the Big Three actually intended to develop super-efficient vehicles, and, to protect themselves, they stepped up their own research efforts. Within a few years, Honda had introduced the Insight, and Toyota had introduced the Prius; both got nearly fifty miles to the gallon. (Carson and Vaitheeswaran are adamant that the Prius is not the car of the future, though they give Toyota high marks for forward thinking.) The Big Three were then forced to play catch-up: Ford eventually licensed hybrid technology from the Japanese. However “the car of the future” functions, the book predicts that its appearance will transform the American auto industry, either by reinvigorating it or by finally killing it off. In the words of Lee Iacocca, Carson and Vaitheeswaran urge the Big Three to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.”