What I Would Like In A Car

One Summer, my daughter and I packed our ailing puppy and a whole lot of stuff into our little Nissan, and headed out West. This was so that daughter and puppy could spend July Fourth with their Mama, my Ex. What with one thing and another, the car died just outside Winona, Arizona. We somehow found our way to Phoenix, and I was under pressure to obtain a car that would not give up the ghost in the middle of the desert. And Junior and I shopped around, and found a used Jeep Cherokee. It was a tragic love affair. It was a big, roomy, chunky automobile that did about 10 miles a gallon, except on the highway, on which it was pleased to give us 18 entire miles a gallon. Its decline began the first time I tried to put it into four wheel drive. Four years later, I had to give it away. The Cherokee violated almost every principle of automobile design that I had espoused. But when I regarded it with loving eyes as it stood in my driveway, it looked exactly like what I thought in my mind a family car should look like. Here is my dream car.

• It should keep you out of the cold and the wet.
• It should have space to haul your stuff.
• It should be easy to drive.
• It should give you lots of miles for very few gallons.
• It should be comfortable.
• It should be stable on the road, with perhaps all-wheel drive.
• It should be agile.
• It should protect the occupants against very minor collisions.
• It should have easy access at the back, and access to the cargo area from the back seat.
• It should have a nice stereo, and tinted windows.
• It should smell nice inside.
• It should look like a JEEP CHEROKEE.

I suppose there are a million reasons why a car that looks like a Cherokee should guzzle gas like a Cherokee, and have all those transmission troubles. But I think the principal reason is that they build cars these days to withstand a head-on collision with a locomotive. If you make cars like that, you're going to get gas mileage like that. Why can't they design cars for people who are reconciled to handing in their dinner pail if they're in a serious accident? With all these trucks whizzing about on the highway, there really is no hope for survival in an accident, so why try? Isn't it better for a few people to die on the highways, than that all the remaining gasoline should be used up to power enormous, heavy automobiles that set out to protect their passengers, and fail anyway, but succeed in eating up a whole lot of fuel? Ralph Nader, the safety prophet, first pointed the finger at the automobiles of the mid 20th century, and started this race to make safe automobiles. The solutions that have been found to the safety problem have generally had implications for gas mileage. From a serious, ecological point of view, as well as from the point of view of conservation and energy efficiency, here's what we need:

1. Low mass transportation. The weights of all transport, including commercial trucks, must gradually be reduced to a minimum.
2. Low speed transport. All vehicles of greater weight than a certain cutoff must be required to keep to speeds under a certain maximum. This means that produce on its way to market will spend a longer time on the road, but SO BE IT.
3. Segregation of high-mass traffic from low-mass passenger vehicles, either on different roads, or on different lanes in the same road.

Perhaps the time has come to make the railways more efficient and consumer-friendly. Intersections with road traffic should be eliminated with under/over passes, so that neither railway traffic nor highway traffic will be slowed down. Efficient locomotives must be designed, and locomotive traffic made more reliable and efficient. This is far easier to do than to regulate highway traffic. If railways become more streamlined in operation, some of the air congestion in the vicinity of airports will surely be relieved. Eventually, our freedom to travel will decline with unavailability of fossil fuels. But it need not decline tomorrow. There is a certain arrogance in the structure of our transportation system, a refusal to compromise freedom and convenience. The large businesses and industries profess to fear the American public, but I have found that these same corporations really run the country. It is possible to make changes easily, and I believe the costs will be far less than they are feared to be.

 Archimedes, who drives a Honda now