Infernal combustion
Blame it on Henry Ford.
If he hadn't been so fantastically successful in putting an automobile in every driveway in America, the world might not be so inextricably linked to fossil fuel and disasters such as the one happening in the Gulf of Mexico might never have occurred. He was, though, and the singular American love affair with the car has shaped energy policy worldwide since the 1920s.
And what a love affair it is! I tried to remember every vehicle I have owned since I bought my first car in 1970. I can come up with 21 vehicles in that span, ranging from a '65 three-speed-on-the-column Plymouth Valiant that I bought for $50 to the new Subaru Forester (all-wheel drive, heated seats) we bought when we moved to the north country.
That Valiant that I bought for $50 was my greatest automotive success story. I drove it for two years, put 61,000 miles on it and sold it for $50. The only significant repair I can recall (probably because I foolishly did it myself) was a new water pump. It was slow, rode like a delivery truck and was uglier than frog snot, but boy, was it reliable!
Buying and selling cars was a lot simpler back then. My second car, which I owned for (and this is no exaggeration) 50 minutes, was a Ford Fairlane station wagon. I haggled Hilt Kelly down to $125 for the car, and got him to agree to let me drive it to the county seat with his plates on it to register it – something that would get you jail time today. I drove it to the place I worked to pick up my paycheck, and on my way to Delhi, a sawdust truck ran a stop sign and T-boned me. When the dust cleared, the entire engine compartment, axle, wheels and all, was about 10 feet north of the rest of the car.
That didn't matter, though, because there were dozens of cars out there to be had for a week's pay or so. And gasoline was about 40 cents a gallon, sometimes less, and you could get Green Stamps for gas purchases – a joy to mothers everywhere.
The car has always represented more than the sum of its parts to America. It has been a status symbol, a sex symbol, a symbol of virility or femininity, a symbol of power. It has formed our culture to a degree reached only by the computer, and it continues to hold its mysterious power over us. How else could we explain why, despite irrefutable evidence that fossil fuels are a finite resource, we have done next to nothing to move to a new generation of personal transportation and have paid less than lip service to developing better forms of mass transit?
I had a buddy in college who owned four Chevy Corvairs. He kept himself in pocket change by engineering minor rear-end collisions; he'd stop suddenly at a yellow light when someone was tailgating him, then he'd arrange payment of $100 or $200 with the driver who hit him to "take care of the damage." When the particular Corvair he was driving got bad enough that he couldn't drive it, he'd take it home, license one of the other ones and head back out on Speedway, ready for the next inattentive contributor.
You could do this in 1970 because a moderately handy person could actually FIX a car, and parts were not so expensive that NAPA dealers had to do a credit check to sell you a set of shocks. Today, forget it. I recently took one of our cars to a reputable dealer for an oil change, and by the time they fixed the broken sway-bar they found, the tab was licking at $400. And modern cars are so complex that you can't even diagnose what's wrong with them without a couple grand worth of computer hardware and software. No wonder mechanics are getting $70 an hour – you need a four-year degree to be able to use the equipment.
If there is a nostalgic tone here, it's because I really liked the simpler aspect of owning a car. In today's world, your car often owns you, between the loan payments on $30,000 to buy a new vehicle and the $1,000 repair bills. I know, though, that we will never return to the old days. (I had a friend with an old Dodge pickup who occasionally had to slide under the truck and tap the linkage with a hammer to get it out of first gear. Try that today.)
But the complexity of car ownership may have a silver lining. More and more people are beginning to believe there has to be a better form of transportation than the old internal combustion solution. It won't happen in my lifetime, but in my kid's lives, something new and better will have come along. And then they can wax nostalgic about their "good old days."
