I was having a long email exchange with Reader Chaz from Britishland, and we were talking about Ferraris and guns and what have you, and on the subject of cars, I actually surprised myself by saying this:
For a toy car, I would certainly choose a Caterham over any Ferrari made today, and not just because of the price, either.
Here’s the subject car under discussion:
…and I have to confess I was very influenced by this episode of Harry’s Garage, where at about the 13-minute mark Harry Metcalfe talks about how the increasing performance and sophistication of modern cars is making them heavier and less fun to drive — “too much power” (harking back to something I’ve said often with regard to Dodge Whatevers with 500hp engines), complexity following from stupid shit like emission controls and electrification, too many driver options (such as “sport mode”, “memory seats”) and so on.
Increasingly, in my sunset years, I want simplicity in a car: get in, turn the thing on, and drive off. (It’s one reason why I love driving New Wife’s Fiat 500 Sputum: stick shift, nothing to touch in the car — yes, it has a Sport mode button, but on a non-turbo 1400cc engine, it is to laugh and I’ve never used it — and driving it is an absolute pleasure. Forty-odd miles to the gallon doesn’t hurt, either.)
If I were in the market for a truck, I’d get a base model Toyota Tacoma with a stick shift. As I’m planning to keep the Tiguan forever, the car issue is moot — but if it was totaled or otherwise became unroadworthy, I’d probably pick a base model VW Jetta with a stick shift.
Or a Caterham with a 2-liter Ford Duratec engine, if the insurance gods were feeling really generous.
Looking across The Pond, where this Green foolishness has reached its apogee, you get statements like this one:
“Shared mobility” means at best enforced carpooling and such, and at worst public transport, which denies people the freedom to go anywhere except where the bus routes and train lines so they can. Individual choice, then, is left to bicycles or this confounded electric scooters.
But note the condescension towards “20th-century thinking” — that would be the twentieth century which outdid the Industrial Revolution in its engineering development and progress, that created the explosion of knowledge distribution which outdid the invention of the printing press, and gave individuals all over the world freedoms unknown since the beginning of recorded history.
In fact, if you think about it, the junior minister’s statement would put individuals back onto trains, buses and bicycles — i.e. the transport systems of the nineteenth century — and no doubt for reasons of animal cruelty, no horseback travel would be allowed, thus making the twenty-first century’s inhabitants even worse off than their nineteenth-century forebears.
A couple years ago, BritPM Boris Johnson decreed that internal combustion-engined cars would be banned from manufacture by 2027 — by what law he didn’t say, which is a topic all by itself — thus making the hapless subjects of the Crown eventually reliant on electric-powered transport, to be powered by an electrical system which is even now insufficient for its existing purpose, let alone the gargantuan future needs of all-electric transportation — hence the suggestion of the junior minister (age 45).
All the same is true over here, although I would suggest (or hope) that any U.S. president who decreed the end of car manufacture as we know it would be thrown out of office at the next election — if not before — and the sheer size of the U.S. market would make the demise of gasoline-powered cars and trucks a remote eventuality indeed.
Although, as The Geek has suggested, the internal combustion engine will most likely meet its end by the death of a thousand cuts rather than by any single authoritarian decree.
It may well be, however, that the key word here is “remote”. I’ve seen several studies among the future generation (under 25 years old) that they are all in favor of the above foolishness — electric cars, mass transport systems etc. — and to be perfectly blunt, if all this is a matter of demographics, then fine: let the future generations revert to nineteenth-century transportation and be governed by twenty-first century totalitarianism.
My generation will all be dead by then, and the little buggers can live with the consequences of this Green silliness that they and their parents adopted oh-so willingly.