Vignettes From America: Rise Of The Robots: Part 1

[This is the story of when I had to hauled a thing I’ll not describe from a place I’m not going to specify to a location that’s none of your business. Enjoy!]

Usually my Dodge is ridiculous. Its massive drivetrain, including an expensive transmission and an engine that would eat a Subaru for breakfast, is overkill. This day overkill was just the right amount of power. The payload was well within spec but still hefty.

As I hauled ass and payload I thought about the lizard people pummeling our formerly prosperous and stable society. A horde of irrelevant screaming eco-dweebs and stern sounding authority figures would like to cram my ass into an electric car. (They’d like to do it to you too!) There’s no room in their glorious theories for real-life variation. There isn’t an electric vehicle on earth that can do what my truck was doing that day. I was using all the horsepower. Bitchy rants by autistic Swedish teenagers mean nothing to a person trying to move tonnage up a hill. Money Obama threw at the Chevy Volt did me no good. Trump and Biden’s subsidies of Tesla were equally irrelevant. I needed horsepower and was bleeding hard from paying Bidenverse prices to fuel the machine to do it.

Electric puddle jumpers will eventually trundle handfuls of urban commuters to the fabric cubicles which have been abandoned in droves since covid. EVs might fill the ranks of the harpies at the HR department downtown but they’ll never drive civilization itself. Nothing in the real world is battery powered and yet strong enough to work a farm.

Such is the irony of an over-regulated world’s inevitable decline. I was doing legal and socially beneficial work. The work depends on tools which “elites” lust to ban. A Soviet peasant in 1975 could tell you all about it.

They’ve more or less tried to eliminate my truck already. For decades it has been a morass of engineering weirdness to get anything running and on the actual road. One side demands unreasonable fuel efficiency. The other slathers each and every vehicle with tons of expensive and heavy safety mandates. None of this is free. Every highly specific fuel injection mapping routine and delicate six speed transmission is funded by someone. It’s a huge (but invisible) pile of dollars extracted from the hands of men who might have spent it productively elsewhere.

You can see how it happens. A room full of college graduates who’ve never hauled a horse trailer in a mudpit gather together. They sit in an air conditioned room on the Potomac to write lists of demands. They hammer on the system day after day, year after year; all the way until the lights go out. (Which they say might happen in fits and starts this summer in Texas, parts of Nevada, and possibly southern California… but who’s worried about that right?)

Another few cranks to the regulatory ratchet and there will be no consumer grade vehicles with balls. No point in wishing it otherwise. The end result for me is a fork in the road. Either I’ll quit or I’ll keep the friggin’ Dodge running forever!

I’ve seen this elsewhere. As a kid growing up in cold war America, I loved articles about embargoed Cuba. I was enamored with the photos of the antique cars. Havana was filled with cars that had been pushed beyond their lifespan long before I even got my license. They were pretty to look at but it was also poignant. The people of Havana were reduced to exhibits in a time zoo. I felt sympathy for the poor bastards. A restored classic for a Sunday cruise is fun but who wants to limp around in a worn out Chevy every day? I peer at the horizon and sense our version of Cuba’s path. Are you ready for AM radio and hand operated windows… forever?

What a pain in the ass it must be? I’d love to own a classic car but if it’s your daily driver wouldn’t you gladly ditch a classic Bel Aire for an eight year old Honda Civic? What if gas was $5 a gallon? At least back then (I don’t know about now) such things weren’t in the cards. The Cuban people were chained down by people who’re comfortable drawing lines around other people’s life options.

We’re not entirely immune to Cuba’s fate. American cars built in the 1970’s ran like anemic shit. They suffered under new regulations until everyone was shoehorned into an expensive fuel injection system with wheels under it. So many Americans switched to Toyotas and Datsuns that Detroit was gutted. The city never recovered. Now we drive around in SUVs which are a loophole in the noose on passenger cars.

We’re much better off than Cuba but it’s a spectrum not a cliff. Where on the wide plains between an East German Trabant and “anything goes” do I really live?

Has the same happened with personal aircraft? It’s said that a logbook is sometimes worth more than the plane itself. A regular person who wants to own a plane tends to wind up with a very carefully maintained antique. It’s hard to build a plane but not that hard. If I could buy a new plane for the cost of a new Subaru, I’d probably be working on my license. Since that’s more or less impossible, I ride motorcycles.

Cubans can’t buy an Ford F-150. Americans can’t buy a Cessna without breaking the bank. Farmers run old tractors because the new ones are fussy and restrictive to repair. (The prices on a 25 year old farm tractor are shocking. In part because John Deere is the Apple product of the fields and nobody’s got time or money for that shit.)

We build the cage in which we lock ourselves.

The media squawks about electric cars and self driving vaporware as if there’s a tidal wave of demand. There isn’t. In real world America, the most popular vehicles are trucks and SUVs. No matter what Biden’s $5 gas forces on us, it isn’t going to make us enjoy an egg shaped 50MPH citybound e-turd.

In general, regulatorily limited cars make sense only in limited situations which correlate with limited lifestyles. For one thing, the baseline is a rock solid electric grid (so nobody sees the coal being burned to make the Tesla go). After that, small opportunities appear. If a retired geezer wants to trundle around The Villages in his boomerific golf cart, more power to him. If Mindy has no plans to go further than the coffee shop and Mandy only goes to her office cubicle they can cost share half a smart car. But if any of them spread their wings it collapses instantly. People that want to take the kids across the state to a little league game, haul a bale of hay, or keep rolling in a snowstorm need more than batteries can give. The smaller and weaker the machine, the more they become ridiculous beyond the walled enclaves of Panem.

Am I in another time zoo? Am I the generation that will see the end of the line for machines like my very powerful and useful Dodge? I think perhaps we’re already on the Cuba track; chained down by the American Government’s incremental embargo against Americans buying what Americans want.

My truck is approaching a quarter million miles. It’s almost old enough to vote. How different is that from my younger self marveling at the tailfins on a Cadillac in Havana? I’ll keep my truck running it as long as I can. It’s necessary. A replacement is unspeakably expensive and each year it becomes more unreachable.

Well that’s all very depressing eh? What can I say, driving gives you time to think.

After a long but productive day for man and machine, I bailed off the road. I considered trying to subsist in a tent somewhere but I crowbarred open my wallet and paid for a hotel.

(To be continued.)