In ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, along with co-author Iain Carson, reviews the history of the oil and auto industries, and, profiling some of today’s most inspiring visionaries, gives voice to a Great Awakening sweeping the industrialized world—the realization that we must develop alternative energy for a new breed of automobile if we want to preserve the environment and diminish the influence of oil from foreign countries.

An award-winning correspondent for The Economist, Vijay joined the staff as the London-based Latin America Correspondent in 1992. He opened its first office in that region in Mexico City, and served as bureau chief until 1997. As the magazine’s Global Environment & Energy Correspondent, he covered the politics, economics, business and technology involved in those topics from 1998 to 2006. His portfolio now encompasses global health, pharmaceuticals and innovation.

ZOOM:

The United States crossed a threshold in 1995 when automobiles first outnumbered the number of citizens with driver’s licenses. Today there are often more cars parked in the average American driveway than there are drivers inside. With more and more nations following our lead and taking to the roads—China and India chief among them—we will soon be a world of a billion cars. That we are in dire need of a new energy policy is obvious. Every presidential candidate has said as much. But what is the best way forward?

Will the combustion engine go the way of the steam engine? Will the big oil companies go the way of the dinosaur? Will the minds that made (and the money made from) the Silicon Valley giants revolutionize the auto industry? In the tradition of Thomas Friedman’s groundbreaking work on globalization, ZOOM is an indispensable, first-rate synthesis of journalism and analysis that not only illustrates the seriousness of the problem, but offers a lucid portrait of what the future could look like.

Vijay is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and teaches at NYU’s Stern Business School. He is a regular commentator on Marketplace radio, in the Wall Street Journal and at other media outlets.

He is also the author of a book on the future of energy, Power to the People (www.vijaytothepeople.com). Harvard’s John Holdren, reviewing the book in Scientific American, called it “by far the most helpful, entertaining, up-to-date and accessible treatment of the energy-economy-environment problematique available. Vijay’s writings have received various prizes in America and abroad. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in Madras, India, and grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut. He now lives in New York.