USA – Earlier in May, the Shell Starship made its landfall on the West Coast of the United States and docked in the hangar at Anaheim, California for the Advanced Clean Transportation (ACT) Expo. Unlike the starships of science fiction, Shell’s ‘Starship 3.0’ is strictly bound to the earth. Looking at it from the outside, at the unbroken line of the 45-degree curve from the roof of the cab to the ground, I was reminded more of a bullet train than the starship Enterprise. However, when I ascended the mobile staircase placed on the righthand side of the vehicle and entered the cab, with its plush interior and its reddish neon lighting, I half-believed that I was climbing into a fictional spacecraft preparing for take-off.

Despite the theatre, Shell’s presentation had a serious intention. The Starship 3.0 is the third such demonstration vehicle made by Shell to incorporate the most fuel-efficient technologies available today to push the combustion engine to its limits, and it is the first to use natural gas instead of diesel. According to Dr Selda Gunsel, the project lead since its inception, the Starship trucks demonstrate the “art of the possible”: they are intended to show what can already be done, with the technologies and the fuels currently at our disposal, to reduce emissions from the tailpipe, while also improving vehicle performance.