You can't have that!

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."

-Daniel Webster-

Every morning's bag of e-mail brings at least one call to arms and sometimes many more. I'm getting tired of the blaring slughorns and fraying pennants, whether or not I support the basic premises.

Take private cars and fuel economy. I got one from NRDC today; that's the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group whose purposes seem reasonably clear from the title. The headline purports to tell me how much I would save by switching to a 60MPG vehicle - one of those hermetically sealed capsules from which I could observe the glory of the ocean and dunes and the beauty of vast natural scenes through tinted windows, darkly. Think of how much money I would save and of course think of how I, an aging superhero, could "go green" and "save the planet!"

Numbers don't lie, people do and when I plugged in my actual figures, it told me I would save about 333 dollars a year. No I wouldn't and whoop-di-do if I did. First of all the cost to all things natural and to me of building another vehicle isn't factored in at all here nor is the possible 60+ year lifespan of my car Vs that of a Japanese post-modernist disposable gumdrop. I 'd have to sell the glorious red 190Mph convertible that may be worth more in my grandchildren's senescence than it is now and buy a rolling toad with those tiny wheels, primitive suspension and a ton of batteries ( which will have to be replaced at a high cost not added to the alleged savings.) Is life and the joy of living worth 300 bucks a year? I could save a fortune by selling the house and moving into a trailer in Central Florida after all. I could choose for myself.

The Modernist movement of the last century brought us the idea of minimalism in architecture; the idea that our homes were machines for living and that living in them made us better and more efficient -- efficient being the key word, I think. The stripped down, unornamented minimalized life of maximum efficiency isn't all that compatible with what most of us would consider a life. Integrating man into the means of production, minimizing private space and emphasizing public and communal areas and mechanizing the whole experience of life doesn't, in the mind of this inefficient life form, make for an existence I would enjoy, to say the least. It hardly allows for experiencing the intense joy of being alive on a minute to minute basis, unless you consider a brief two week packaged vacation from the cubicle to be living.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a machine or a piece of production equipment. My house is not a machine and my preferred transportation would not resemble one of those pneumatic capsules you put your checks and deposit slips into at the drive-through bank.

Send a message urging the government to strengthen pollution and fuel efficiency standards to deliver 60 miles per gallon by 2025!

screams the headline. It doesn't mention that the glut of huge, heavy, clumsy, dangerous hunks of iron now clogging the curves on our roads was the direct result of that same message sent back in the 1970's as a hysterical response to the Arab Oil Embargo. That was a perfect example of the "here's a problem - let's pass a bill" kind of knee-jerk politics that's clogged our arteries for decades and no, we can't hardly pin that on the Republicans.

You can get a 60 mpg vehicle right now if you want it - a 100 mpg vehicle that costs a thousand dollars. They sell them in several places around this town, you just have to sweat in the heat and get wet when it rains, and you can't go very fast but hey, it's all about efficiency and going green, right? Many people choose that, many enjoy it -- including me, for what it's worth, but it's a choice, not the result of a Federal mandate. Sometimes you feel like a truck, sometimes you don't -- you consider the need and the budget and you makes your choice. But is it "saving the planet" to drive one of those terrifying "smart Cars?" Did anyone stop to notice that the US military is the largest single fossil fuel burner in our country? Is our problem really cars or is it how much we drive. How much of the passion is really that same stale neo-Luddism that nestled into Liberal thought back in the 60's when it was oh so hip to destroy cars in the name of whatever you call it?

Sure Americans waste untold resources driving to work, waste a fortune to drive fashionably military-looking "safety" vehicles that cause 4 times more accidents and have to crawl through maneuvers like airships, but is the answer to regiment us, to furnish us with little steel boxes and proclaim "only this and nothing more?" Maybe it's time to let Dracula out of his coffin and raise the fuel tax! (gasp) Let people work out their personal mathematics by themselves - maybe move closer to work, maybe use a small car to drive to the train station, maybe buy a scooter. Raise the taxes steadily and put the money into high speed rail and local light rail. Eventually our obscene sprawl will contract and the mall to mall crawl may become a trip into town or down the block and people can make choices that suit them and their needs - you know, like free people in a free country. We don't trust you to use that ( insert anything here) wisely, we don't think you need it and therefore, you can't have it. It's the recipe for bad measures indeed.

Sure, I'm strongly convinced that something needs to be done, but I'm strongly convinced that it doesn't require us to become soulless gears and cams in the efficient, regulated machine of commerce and the State, if there's any difference between the two.

Mutant ninja drivers

That guy in front of you, the one who can't stay in his lane, who takes 20 seconds to respond to the light changing to green, who needs four lanes to make a turn, who slows down for green lights and sails through the red -- who amongst us hasn't made rude anatomical and ancestral references? Perhaps we should be more tolerant.

Steven Cramer, a neurology professor at the University of California Irvine, has published a study in Cerebral Cortex that indicates the presence of a gene variation in about 30% of the population that makes them not only bad drivers, but drivers that don't learn from their mistakes. I've read many studies showing that nearly all accidents are caused by a small percentage of drivers and that that group is not distinguished by high speed driving. They're just bad drivers and maybe we now have some idea why. As to whether this genetic marker occurs more frequently in some population segments? Why yes, I do have a ten foot pole, but it's on my boat and I'm not going there, thank you.

I don't want to put too much faith in one study, but I do like studies that confirm my prejudices and maybe the next time some idiot looks me in the eyes and pulls out onto the highway 5 feet in front of me or stops on the entrance ramp or cruises through the red making a right turn, I'll roll down the window and shout "You miserable brain-derived neurotrophic factor deprived mutant!" instead of the usual.

Gas is not the measure of all things

What profiteth a man should he gain the fuel economy yet lose his soul?

Will we as President Obama promises, all be driving electric cars by 2015? I know I won't, unless it's a third car for doing grocery shopping or I take up golf. I simply don't drive enough miles to see an economic payback in my lifetime, but far, far more than that, the loss of an outlet for my passion for machines would be like the loss of a loved one. For a hundred years, cars have been an art form, expressing things that nothing else ever had or could have. Then came the American consumer and his disposable Japanese appliances and the passionate creations of an Ettori Bugatti or an Enzo Ferrari or a Zora Arkus-Duntov or a Larry Shinoda have begun to give way to whatever cheap piece of tin will get us and our bottles of water to places of further consumption.

To drive some soulless disposable transportation appliance isn't in me. I'd rather walk. To sell it as a technological advance is a bit like trying to convince me that moving to a Tokyo style beehive hotel would be more "modern" and efficient and thus more desireable. It would be if I were a bee. As a man, it would be a sentence.

Mr. Obama made a point of telling us this afternoon, that today's esyouvees don't get the mileage of a 1908 Model T and I want to be the first to tell you that he's wrong! The 1908 offering from Ford was the Model S. The T debuted as the 1909 model in October of 1908. There was no 1908 Model T. Of course his attempt to use the iconic automobile to show that we haven't advanced technologically is fallacious. My 1926 model T, admittedly a bit heavier than the 1909, got about 15-18mph at about 25 Mph. Top speed was about 35-40 if you didn't care to live very long (or about burning up the engine) since the brakes are horrifying and the high center of gravity made for easy rollovers -- much like today's esyouvees. The fallacy of distraction lies in the fact that fuel economy is a small part of what makes a good and safe automobile whether or not it is poetry in motion.

The real problem is not that we haven't developed more fuel efficient engines -- we have. There's almost as much difference between the engines of 100 years ago and today as there is between a 1909 telephone with a crank on it and the digital voice mail, caller ID phones you can buy cheaply today. The Model T made about 20 horsepower. With the same fuel consumption a modern engine may get as much as 600. The same degree of progress applies to tires, brakes, suspension systems and materials. They are all vastly improved. It's just that we do everything we can to induce people to feed childish fantasy with heavy iron trucks that weigh more than 7 times what a model T weighs and travel three times as fast but without much more stability. We do everything we can to make people get everywhere by car and take more and more stuff with them.

Do I really want a battery car that has to stop and pay someone to switch batteries every two hours or less if I drive with the air conditioning and lights on? No. Do I want a car that when it runs out of charge on some remote road at midnight or in the center lane in rush hour will need to be towed? No. Do I want to go back to the 1930's in terms of handling? No. Do I want a car that would force me to take non-existent public transportation should I want to drive to Orlando or Miami? Of course not. Give me the Model T! At least it had some soul, required some skill, could be customized in infinite ways and made the driver feel glad to be alive. There is far more to technology and to life than cheap, basic and Puritan transportation.

I can drive off the Chevrolet lot with a brand new 30+ mpg car made of Kevlar, carbon fiber, magnesium and aluminum that does 190, holds track records around the world and will take me to California in air conditioned comfort on a few tanks of gas -- which only take a few minutes to pump -- and sorry, I'm not giving up my red roadster and the topless joy it gives me on an open road to be enclosed in some grotesque, airless little Pokemon clone like something from a Disney Movie. Not so that some twit can make up for his feelings of insecurity by driving the Incredible Hulk's own Monster Truck.

The technology needed to slash fuel consumption is there already. the problem is a culture that separates people from their occupations by 20, 40, 60 or more miles without benefit of trains; that has women spending days chauffering children and driving between malls many miles apart. The Problem is a culture that promotes fear and phobia in order to sell "safe" vehicles that get into far more accidents and that offers tax breaks to people who lease essyouvees.

Yes, slippery slope arguments are inherently fallacious too, but I have nightmares about Americans of the future living in stainless steel beehives, wearing uniforms and living the lives of worker bees so that we can continue to procreate ourselves out of anything remotely like the kind of existence that is worth having.

The way to better transportation is through having far fewer cars and far more trains. the way to better cars is more likely through light weight alloys and composites, but also through fuel cell hybrids with batteries or supercapacitor storage far in advance of anything on the drawing boards today. The way to motivate and fund it is through taxing gross vehicle weight, since taxing only fuel is regressive.

Untill all these dreams come true, you'll have to pry the keys to my Chevy from my cold, dead fingers.

No prospect for recovery

The New York Times humor section asks you to come up with a caption for this picture. I don't find anything funny about it, other than the fact that Americans have so long sneered at the idea of small, fuel sipping American cars while complaining that Detroit isn't technically adept enough to produce them. The little Nash Metropolitan was one of many failures in the era of "bigger is better" and that's an era with no signs of ending. In fact nobody makes cars big enough for us, or clumsy, or unstable enough, so we drive trucks and vans and pretend, like Governor Schwarzenegger said on 60 minutes last night, that magic technology will allow us to keep driving them and keep making them bigger.

I was waiting at a light to turn on to old Dixie Highway yesterday, top down and shades on, when a venerable Porsche 356, followed by a TR-4, followed by an XK120 rolled past in convoy making a joyful noise; tops down in the fragrant, 75 degree Florida sunshine. I had hoped to catch up with them and share the country road and the joy of life for a moment, but of course by the time the light changed, there was an SUV and then another and a van and a huge jacked up pick-up lumbering along, their timid occupants sealed in bank vault vehicles, breathing canned air and peering through their tinted windows darkly.

But of course Americans are always victims, so it's the manufacturers' fault that we hate and fear small cars and American's hate being American so it's Detroit's fault that it isn't located in Japan. Funny though, that Toyota, who also makes the same kind of misbegotten vehicles Americans crave is suffering too and so is Honda and so, it seems, is everyone else. Toyota announced after Monday's close that it expected to lose more than a billion and a half dollars in 2009 and Japan's exports are already down 26%. Spokesmen for Honda say they see no prospect for recovery. But when it does come, if it does come, won't we go back to our same old trucks with renewed lust?

So how do we convince the mothers of America that they don't need 4 ton trucks to go to the beauty parlor and that safety has a much to do with putting down the Evian and the cell phone and learning how to pick a line through a corner as it does with Gross Vehicle Weight? Does it even matter if we will have to resort to buying cars we can actually afford because we can't get credit or are out of a job? Whatever happens, the open road and the spirit of adventure and freedom are gone and those "On The Road" Dean Moriarty moments won't ever happen again if Mom and her Hummer can help it.

Passing gas

What with the cost of gasoline these days, we can expect a renewed outbreak of gimmicks, scams and slinky salesmanship designed to relieve the panicked and gullible of some extra cash. Since I began reading car magazines and accessory catalogs as a kid in the 1950's there have always been gadgets: magnets you clamp on your fuel line, resistors to put in series with the ignition cables, little pills that go in the gas tank, things you put in the air intake, little propellers that fit under a carburettor (remember those?) and all kinds of additives. None of them ever worked at all. They still don't.

More recently tire shops have begun to sell the idea that filling your tires with pure Nitrogen for about ten bucks a tire will increase your gas mileage. They have arguments like the one that says they will stay up to pressure longer than the 80% nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide you breathe for free, and your tires will last longer. Humbug. Yes, it will prevent the inside of your tires from oxidizing, but that's isn't a problem in the first place. It will slightly slow air loss from the tires, but if you check them once a month -- as you should do anyway -- you don't have a problem in need of solving. Will you live long enough, considering the $40 and monthly refills to see any benefit? Medical science isn't promising immortality any time soon.

Sales of new SUV's are off and resale prices are down significantly. Common wisdom has it that what we really need is tiny cars with tiny engines screaming their lungs out to produce enough acceleration so that Mom's megatruck won't run you over, but is that the answer? Not always. My wife's little PT Cruiser, for instance, doesn't get the highway mileage of my Corvette and is about equal around town. In fact the 400 hp car is relatively equal to a Hyundae Sonata in the mileage department because it's made of lightweight composites and has a 6 speed transmission -- and that brings me to my point: learn to drive a manual transmission and you'll save a lot more gas than you will with any of the things that bolt on or pour in your ride, and your slow car will be a little bit faster too.

That shoebox look may be a real sexy thing if you're 16 and have a bone through your nose, but shoebox aerodynamics cost you money and that $300 wing you bought from J.C. Whitney is only going to make it worse. If you drive at any speed, aerodynamics matter -- a lot. If you don't need all wheel drive, don't buy it. It adds a lot of weight and reduces mechanical efficiency.

But hey -- you just had to have that Escalade didn't you?