Norman — I’m taking a trip soon and dealing with a dryer with a burnt-out heater coil that takes about eight cycles to dry my jeans, so I’ll try to keep this one a bit short.
The trip itself, for which I need the aforementioned jeans dried, is about a used car, maybe — well, that, and definitely seeing a little bit of Colorado’s picturesque mountain scenery. On an interesting note, it’s cars that have been on my mind all day, ever since a close call with a gray late-model Toyota Camry driven by a graying woman of about 50, I think.
I was walking around town, as I do a great deal, when I passed a side street. Seeing the Camry, I grimaced a bit and hustled out of its way. It seemed to be coming up on my position in a crosswalk in its path a little too fast for my liking. But the car’s brakes worked, its accelerator did not stick (though its engine revved awfully high for a properly functioning four-cylinder coming to a stop) and I am alive and writing this.
I am alive, but ashamed. The driver, perhaps someone’s nice pink-clad matronly aunt, saw the look on my face and her own expression drooped a bit. I had reminded her that in the last month her sensible, fuel-efficient and generally well-liked car had mutated into the stuff of nightmares, or at least quietly nervous apprehension, for other motorists and pedestrians alike. The badge on the Camry’s grille may have looked like two perpendicular halos making a “T” but they might as well have been a combination of horns, flames and the number 13.
It later occurred to me as I paid various bills and bought groceries around town that, although the faults possibly lying in wait within some computer inside the woman’s car, perhaps waiting for just the wrong split second in which to frighten, to damage, to maim, to kill, were not her fault, in a larger sense, they were. And they were also my fault. And the fault of every American driver (or hopeful driver) who looked down their noses at people taking their sweet time gassing up the massive fuel tanks on their sputtering Lincolns, rusting Cadillacs, bloated Ford Excursions, Expeditions, et cetera, et cetera, and of course that prince of all gas-guzzling darkness, the Hummer. My thoughts in such situations were always something like, “Well, I’m not getting one of those wasteful dinosaurs. I will drive a sensible car, something light and efficient and good for the Earth.”
And, amid more than a few missteps, at one point I had a decently efficient little Ford Ranger, and for a while at another point a Chevrolet Corsica.
Of course, they both still burned gasoline. And that’s the fundamental problem. Pushed by good old popular demand for more, more, more, Toyota delivered, at least on the efficiency front, by including more, more, more computers. But there are only so many computers that can be added to an internal combustion vehicle before the potential for catastrophic electronic failures becomes so great as to cancel out any gains in efficiency. Toyota skated that razor edge, and has fallen off.
Ironically, Hummer stayed about as far from that edge as possible and apparently will be going out of business very shortly itself, barring an unlikely eleventh-hour buyout. In between the sad tale of that definite failure and Toyota’s increasingly probable downfall is the truth about how we get around in this nation and in the greater world at large.
We are using a dirty, potentially dangerous technology originally devised as a way to use up a flammable liquid, gasoline, proven unsafe for use in most cooking applications or lanterns. And on both ends of the efficiency spectrum, the over-engineered and the under-engineered areas, this technology, like many concepts pushed to their logical extremes, is beginning to fail.
I think we are entering the twilight of the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine as the chief mode of getting around really fast on this earth — it’s pretty much all we have for now but we need to come up with something else, and put it into broad implementation, fast. As in a decade or two at the most.
Still, I’d urge people out there with older cars to take the best care they can of them. Squeeze and coax every mile you can out of that rustbucket until it won’t turn over. If you know someone selling a reasonably safe used car cheap, buy it. Do not pour money into buying a brand-new something for which there might not be any fuel left in 30 years anyway.
A lot of people have tried the compromise of buying a shiny new little car packed with gizmos and easy on the gas-guzzling. And some of them have died for it. In what may be an ironic twist, I can’t say I know of any Hummer driver who went out screaming at a 911 operator for help as his or her car drove itself off a cliff.
It’s time to demand another, safer and more sustainable alternative and it’s time to make it known we will buy new cars when new cars use an alternative that works. Period. I’m not going to claim knowledge of whether the new way will be one of biofuels, hydrogen, electric power or something else.
And whatever it is, this new fuel, may have many drawbacks. Cars going over 70 miles per hour, or even 40, may be consigned to history books or sport racing. Vehicles that seat more than one or two people may not be feasible either. Perhaps a compromise wherein the jiggling energy reserves stored within our country’s swelling waistlines will be harnessed through some kind of augmented human power in the general spirit of pedal power may be the best solution. And so on.
But wherever there is, we have to get there from here. And soon. “No blood for efficiency” may not be as sexy a slogan as “no blood for oil,” but blood spilled on the altar of a broken technology is blood spilled all the same.
Adam Scott 366-3531 ascott@normantranscript.com
