There are plenty of causes out there. Save the Whales! Save The Turtles! Save The Trees! Save The Beavers! Save the Tata’s (oh yea, the most important of course)! If you want to have a cause, if you want to be a social warrior of some sort, there is a cause out there for you.
Well, how about we Petrolheads? What is our cause? What can we stand for? Well, I have one for you, and of course as I just commuted home from the job I use to afford to pay for my domain and blog…and maybe for a mortgage and utility bills as a secondary reason, I know the best cause to support for us to choose.
You already know where I am going with this. You leave work, anxious to get home, especially on a Friday. It’s the weekend, it-s time for relaxation and fun, and how does it always start off? Yup, it ALWAYS starts off with Rush Hour Traffic which is always exacerbated by some blankety blanking idiot in his 90hp 15-year-old Civic with one tail light out, hasn’t’ been washed in ten years, and of course he has one of those gigantic mufflers that makes his car sound like a 5th grade child taking his first trombone lesson and can’t stop producing voluminous amounts of spit. They get in the left lane and they STAY THERE! It’s called “Parking In The Left Lane” and it is one of the single worst things one can do to one’s fellow man. It is inhumane!
We need to “Save The Highways!”. Yes, this is our cause, to save the highways. Think about it, it actually is important. We all talk about government waste of taxpayer dollars. One normally thinks that the biggest waste is on “war/defense” items. Actually, it isn’t. The biggest waste is actually “Highway Build/Repair/Maintenance”. You know the drill, there are 5 workers with 1 shovel standing around a hole, while you are forced to drive by on a major highway at 30mph in the Construction Zone. From potholes to entire overpasses, vast billions of your tax dollars are wasted on overruns and bad deals. Federal government wastes money on this, state governments waste money on this, local governments waste money on this. It is an endless cycle of wasting our hard-earned money.
Want to know how to alleviate this problem? There is an answer, and it is the Mission Statement for our new cause of “Save The Highways”. Ready for it? Here goes…..”Everyone needs an Autonomous Car in their driveway and/or garage!”
Ok, I know that I pretty much made you read this and basically do something like faint, or vomit, or scream, and of course you hurled some profanities at me and called me crazy. An Autonomous Car is the very OPPOSITE of what a Petrolhead wants. It is a bane of our existence. We love to drive, we love to grip that big thick steering wheel and whip through turns and inbetween cars and feel that G-Force. Autonomous cars take 100% of that away from us. So how would any self-respecting Petrolhead ever support this? Let me explain the method to my madness.
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, back when some of you had your grandparents actually still “making your parents”, there was this thing called the Gas Shortage. Gas Stations had a huge gas crisis. Lines were at every station, you would wait for hours, only to get maybe a few gallons of gas allotted to you. To fix this, everyone had one gas car and one diesel car in their driveway. Diesel with its high MPG would mean fewer trips to the gas station, and allow you to save the gas car for the weekends. Of course, that gas car would be your fun car, your Petrolhead-loving car.
For my family, we had the Mercedes 300D, with 0-60mph time of 21 seconds……no, I’m not kidding…..yes, I know you are dying laughing. Ok, I will make you laugh some more. We bought the car through the European Delivery program. Picked it up in Stuttgart, drove it through 10 countries in 30 days and shipped it home. I was but a wee child then, so my doom was to be trapped in the back seat in a hot summer on navy blue leather seats that my mother left the protective plastic wrap on so my little brother and I wouldn’t stain the leather if we spilled our food or drink on the seat. In the end, we roasted like a stuck pig at a luau. While I loved what I saw outside the car, being in that car was truly hell on Earth. Oh, and ready for this, the piece du resistance…..on the Autobahn we could only get the car to 80mph……..wow, I actually just physically heard a guy in Seattle laugh, it was so loud. Well, it happened, and I must live with the horror.
On the other hand, my father had a Porsche 928, and it was beautiful. Still one of the two best exhaust notes I have ever heard in my life. Easy way to hear it, rent the movie Weird Science from the 1980’s and fast forward to the scene where the two geeks pick up their beautiful woman from the mall and race off. A nice long drawn out German exhaust note, oh, it’s pure joy to the ears. A true shame that the car came standard with enough bad luck gremlins to make Porsche let it go. Still the most fantastic automobile design of all time. From 1978 through 1995, the main shell of the car never changed. Bumpers, taillights, rims, interior, all got changed. However, the main shell never did, and it never looked old.
Fast Forward to recent future, where we have hybrids. No, not the P1 or 918, I mean the foul loathsome Prius and cars as such (future article still being written about these hideous monstrosities). If you have a Prius, you know that it is the universal sign of “No one will date me, so I just gave up and bought a Prius.” However, this has been our “Second car that is a high MPG eco-green-Earth-friendly mode of transport” option for a few years.
There is a nasty extra point to digress on additionally. I have friends with AutoNation, which is based down here in sunny South Florida. They say that people are jumping the company like rats from a sinking ship. Executives are cashing out, it is bedlam. Why you ask? Millenials! Yup, those folks who like to eat/drink/sleep/make love to their smart phones. They love those phones so much, they know they can’t drive with them, so they are not buying cars. Kids aren’t getting their first driver’s license until they are in their 20’s!!! That’s scary. The car industry is currently at a high spot with only a downward trend coming. AutoNation is prepping for the downturn.
NOW however, thanks to the car so aptly named from the magnificent inventor of olden days, Nikolai Tesla, we have a true Petrolhead saving grace. Think about it, you can have the electric car that saves the environment but still is crazy fun to drive. Then on the weekends, pull out that old Ferrari you have been tinkering on in the garage and go for a spin. Me, I can afford my Mini for the week and BMW for the weekend, and I am quite happy. Each is a blast to drive.
Now, for the true meat of this. The Tesla, as we all know, is working on becoming autonomous. When they perfect it, one can simply get in their car, say “Car, take me to work”, and let it take us there. Relax, read the news, watch a show, and then you are at work. You don’t have to do the wretched Rush Hour traffic, you can ignore it.
If a millennial gets in their autonomous car, then it drives for them. They can still cuddle to their phone and whisper sweet nothings to it on their way to work. They can InstaFaceTwitterBook their whole commute.
Then, add if EVERYONE commuted in an autonomous car, then all cars would be computer controlled to a traffic system. No more traffic jams, no more red lights or long lines to get on/off highways. NO MORE ACCIDENTS! All of this gone.
Now look even deeper. With no more accidents, then insurance companies don’t pay expensive claims, so insurance rates plummet, saving you money. Also, people who are bad drivers won’t need driver’s licenses, they just let the car drive, so better driving on the highway contributes even more. It also means that the DMW will have shorter lines. Oh yea, dare to dream!
Additionally, if cars are gentler on the highway, then there are less potholes, less wear/tear to the highways, and so they need to be fixed less often, so that is also saving money from being wasted on bad highway projects. Think of all that money that stays in your pocket instead of being blown in the wind. The only thing that should blow in the wind is the hair of your hot girlfriend/wife as you have the top down and flying down the road driving over a buck in speed.
Couple this in with the future of more and more people being able to telecommute as technology also builds up our home Internet speeds and we can connect to our jobs and work and never have to go in, this just makes our highways more and more empty.
And we all know what an empty highway means to us Petrolheads. It means empty lanes for spirited driving. Imagine that you could get on I95 in Miami, or the 405 in California, or the NJ Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, right at 5pm, and imagine the lanes near empty. That makes me more excited than when my puppy gets her chicken-coated rawhide bone and does her happy dance.
So, while the initial thought of autonomous cars sounds like a horrible proposition, it is actually the opposite. It is the savior of the supercar!
So, print out your tshirts, put up signs in your office, tell all your friends, that when they ask you if you are socially aware and want to help out society, you tell them, ”I have my cause! Save The Highways! Drive Autonomous Cars”.
Me, I hope Apple will make one, so it will properly sync up my IPhone with the car and I can cuddle with it on the way to work.