detroit blues

The car industry is finally finding out that people don't need two cars. They don't need big inconvenient pieces of metal that guzzle gas, are awkward to drive, pollute the environment, and serve no purpose other than to impress potential mates. I wrote about this in November 2007. I called it mating dance.

Humans, and male humans especially, like to show off for the opposite sex. Like peacocks, human males are willing to put up with showy but otherwise inconvenient and bothersome display artifacts. The mating dance car is curiously maladroit. It is a race car that is unfit to race, a four wheel drive that is unfit for off-road duty, or a "sport-utility" vehicle that is neither a truck nor a passenger car. Or perhaps a "luxury" vehicle that the owner has to drive. Go figure!

The situation has gotten out of hand. Even when it comes to showing off, Detroit and its foreign cronies have run out of ideas. I admit that I do like cars. And so I know what I am talking about when I say there has been no worthwhile improvement on the market for at least 10 years. Nothing worth buying really. Nothing that didn't exist 10 years ago in a better format. Because car companies have long since run out of "innovations." 

To make up for this lack of ideas, they have jumped onto the trend of building moving living rooms. They have added and continue to add every single home improvement item they can think of. Massage chairs, stereos, DVD players, phones, fridges, you name it. All of it clutters up the car, adds weight, destroys performance, and otherwise makes driving less enjoyable. But then again, who can drive these days? People spend their time sitting in traffic instead. So maybe they need their gadgets to avoid boredom?

Cars are a very American way to show off. Europeans also use cars for this purpose, but to a lesser extent. They tend to concentrate on fine clothing and smaller luxury items like watches, fountain pens, etc. Conceptually, it isn't any different, except that fountain pens don't consume gallons of gas and spew out tons of carbon dioxide. Fountain pens can be fine display items that do very little to destroy our habitat.

Something to think about in these hard times.