Hi, I’m at the gas station. I want you to meet my friend Bruce, the paramedic who was called to revive me after I saw today’s gas price. In an effort to make me feel better, Bruce assured me that gas still costs less than having a kidney transplant, but not much.
As I was pumping the money I need to buy food and medicine into my car’s gas tank, I started thinking, whatever happened to those cars of the future we uses to see in illustrations. You know the ones that looked like a jet fighter or space ship on wheels. They were going to be powered by atomic energy and be self-driving so we could enjoy a cocktail on our way home from work. We are at a time in history where some car companies are experimenting with self-driving cars, but it’s not working as well as expected. These cars look like they’re being driven by someone who had too many cocktails after work. Could a person be arrested for ”Driving While Not Driving?” Asking for a friend.
If you squint really hard, you might actually see some cars that do look like some of the crazy designs from 60 years ago. The current Corvette, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Tesla and Prius all seem to have a very aerodynamic shape and look like they could be the eggs from some giant, but sleekly designed dinosaur.
Of these cars, the Prius doesn’t seem to belong. It costs a fraction of what those elite sports cars cost and it was not supposed to be a futuristic design. They were developed to help Toyota meet its gas mileage requirements that were imposed by the government. A car manufacturer’s gas mileage requirement is not based on individual cars but the combined gas mileage for their whole fleet. One way of reducing their overall gas mileage was to build one car with very high mileage and they wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of their brand names. I don’t think Toyota expected the Prius to become a hit with the car buying public. Today you can’t sit at a stop light without seeing one of the elliptical shaped cars next to you or driving by. Due to the success of the Prius, every car manufacturer has pulled out the stops and started building hybrids and electric cars. You can now buy an electric BMW, hybrid Porsche, a battery powered Mercedes Benz and a fully electric Mustang, that looks nothing like a Mustang except for the logo glued to the front. Steve McQueen is rolling over in his grave! For you younger folk, look up the movie “Bullet.”
As each year goes by, we do have all kinds of new features being installed in our cars. I just bought a new car in 2020 and it came with all kinds of bells and whistles that make my drive safer and more comfortable…except for that idiot in the giant pickup truck with the huge flag flying from the bed that keeps cutting into my lane. My car collision sensors start beeping and screaming, warning me he was getting too close. Apparently he didn’t have the same safety features, or he’s just a jack ass. I was forced to stick my hand out the window so I could flash the international signal for “please drive carefully.” He must have seen it because he waved back with the same one finger salute. Isn’t communication great?
I have a lot of features in my car, that I really don’t need, including automatic windshield wipers. Why do I need that? If the window is wet, I turn on the wipers. Of course there are some slow people out there who need to be told. I also have heated seats…in Southern California. I’m sure if I were back in Chicago, it would be a nice feature on one of those brisk, winter mornings. It didn’t make sense until my back cramped up after a round of golf. I jumped in the car and turned on my giant heating pad, called the driver’s seat, and my back relaxed for a comfortable drive home. Another feature I discovered while not knowing it was there was that the car wants to steer itself at times. When in cruise control, the car uses the cameras on the front windshield to focus on the lane lines and the car will keep you in your lane. It feels like somethings wrong with the front end but it is just the computer thinking it can do a better job of steering than I can. At the same time, it will control your distance from the car in front of you. As you start getting closer, it slows you down. There goes one of my favorite past times, tailgating the guy in front of me in the fast lane, who’s doing 20 miles an hour under the speed limit. It forces me to be congenial. Maybe that “drive safely salute,” would come in handy here.
There are so many little things in my car, I can’t keep up with them. I would try but the manual for the car is as thick as a Webster’s dictionary. Have I read the manual, no. There’s nothing like discovering a new feature while you’re doing 80 miles an hour down the freeway. Like my automatic bright lights. They come on and off at any time and it makes cars coming the other way say hello by returning a flash of their bright lights. Again, ain’t communication great.
We were also supposed to have flying cars by now. What happened to my flying car? Elon Musk and Jeff Bezzos rocketing their rich friends into space doesn’t count. Passengers strapped to a giant firework really can’t be considered a flying car. I thought I would be tooling along like George Jetson, coming home from work in my airborne means of transportation. I wonder if it would make the same whistling sound? I guess if we do eventually have flying cars, they will also have invented hovering orange cones to reduce my flight path home and screw up traffic at 10,000 feet, while they repair nothing.
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