Picture a beautiful sunny day. Blue skies are all around and there is a warm gentle breeze coming from the south. It’s a Saturday, mid-morning and all the cartoons are over. Your lawn is screaming to be mowed, and your neighbors are screaming as well. With a shrug of your shoulders, you pile the kids in the car for a fun, family day, and drive to a giant flat piece of asphalt about 50 feet wide and a half mile long. There are bleacher seats off to one side with a concession stand underneath, selling the perfect hot dog, Bud Light, and soft pretzels. The stands are full of people dazzled with anticipation and excitement. An announcer blurts out over the loud speaker,
“Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for our National Anthem”
You take your hat off, place it on your chest, over your heart, and sing in unison with 5000 other people, praising their country. An uproar of applause, probably heard for miles, begins before the pretty woman singing finishes the word “brave,” followed by… the most intense; chest pounding, adrenaline pumping, eyes twitching, awe inspiring, excitement of raw gasoline being exploded tens of thousands of times a second, producing power strong enough to rattle windows, and your guts, by the 100 or so hot rod cars showing their patriotism to their country by revving their engines. A song lyric come to mind by the band Cake, “reluctantly crouched at the starting line, engines pumping and thumping in time,” as you pump your fists in the air showing your kids it is okay to not be scared and cry from the sheer power being produced by these amazing marvels of engineering genius. Then you sing the beginning of the song “Fuel” by Metallica, “Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire.” Your family day is about to begin at the drag races watching these cars turn gasoline into torque, through explosions contained inside a hunk of metal, commonly called engines. You can’t wait to see which car is the fastest to make it down the track, winning “brownie points” for the day, and also to see which car is pushed past its limits, making the internal combustion, external. Just before the races begin, with the smell of un-burnt fuel and tire smoke in the air, you think to yourself,
“Wow, this is amazing. I sure hope these races never go away in the future,” as you fix your gaze on your buddy, who showed up late in his Prius. You are not going to experience this excitement with the new electric or hybrid cars of today. Mostly,what would your family day look and feel like at the track with an electric powered car? Boring and quiet, I bet.
First of all, with the creation of the electric and hybrid car, we get the ability to produce torque in a non-mechanical way. For a lot of people, it doesn’t matter how the car goes forward or backwards, but for us normal people, the electric and hybrid idea is a slap in the face to all the years of gasoline engine ingenuity. A gasoline engine is just that, an engine. An engine mechanically produces motion and can be called a motor, but an electric motor is never an engine. It can mechanically produce nothing! In fact, the electricity that is created to power an electric car was originally produced from an engine. This brings up a simple question; what came first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, the engine came first. Without the engine, there would be no motors, therefore the electric and hybrid car inferior. Don’t get me wrong, electricity has its place; like shooting out of the sky during a thunder storm and keeping your local power company employees busy, but not propelling our cars.
Secondly, the history behind the gasoline-powered car, by far, surpasses the history of anything electric or hybrid. We can go back in time, over a century, with an the evolution of the engine in your car, but, poor ol’ electric and hybrid cars only have ten years or so, making them like little ducklings trying to fly with the big guys. How many times have you heard stories of backyard mechanics, tinkering under the hood of their GOAT (1966 Pontiac GTO), making the classic General Motors big block engine with factory Ram Air induction, run faster in street races by changing the cam shaft and carburetor? If you are like me and the rest of the U.S. population, I would imagine your answer would be, “all the time.” Now picture the same backyard mechanic under the hood of a Nissan Leaf (if it even has a hood). Identification of the parts and components in there would be almost impossible, let alone “souping up” the thing. I am sure there would be some neat comments about how “black-plastic’y” everything looked though. Now, you may want to stop here, crumble up this paper and say,
“Whatever! Technology these days had evolved these electric cars so that we can use them without the need of souping anything up.”
I would say,
“You must have been dropped as a baby. Technology is a huge asset to all of us but that is not a reason to refrain from souping up your car! It’s the biggest reason!”
Again, think about stories of growing up. Remember your family vacations in the Chevy Caprice wagon with wood paneling? Remember when you had to sit in the back, sweating to death, and fighting with your siblings over whose turn it was to sit in the middle? Those were the good days. Yes, Electric and hybrid cars have back seats that you could potentially fight over, and yes, they are big too, if you are an infant, but most infants I have talked to don’t talk back and should be in a car seat anyways. Something a Caprice Classic has not problems accommodating.
Lastly, I want to take a look at how gasoline cars and electric and hybrid cars have impacted the entertainment industry. The gasoline powered car has brought about the best music and TV shows America has ever had the opportunity to be blessed with. Music like “Fuel” by Metallica, “Jesus Built My Hotrod” by Ministry, and “Hot Rod Lincoln” by Commander Cody, just to name a few. There have been great TV shows also, like; Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazard, which have been staples in American television. The electric and hybrid world brought us all, “Electric Car” by They Might be Giants and a little blip in a South Park cartoon where Stan (a character in the show) makes a parody about the “joys” of hybrid cars. With “Electric Car” and South Park, we can all conclude they are entertainment, and that’s about all.
Maybe one day the little electric and hybrid cars of our future will have their own program on The History Channel, created memories for people to look back on, and impact our music and TV like the American gasoline automobile, but until then, they should be treated like a comparison between the heavy metal music of Metallica and the prima donna, pop-psychedelic, emo yuck-mix, of They Might be Giants… OOPS! Sorry, there is no comparison, only a sarcastic contrast.
Blog's Your Uncle 