Futility Vehicle

Judith Warner

N.Y. Times, 10 July 08

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/futility-vehicle/

This is a story of selfishness and greed, of self-centeredness, envy and the ignorant folly of a person too short-sighted to realize she should count herself lucky because her college education didn’t have to be paid for with the milk of a goat.

The tale could be called: I Can No Longer Afford to Drive My Car.

The vehicle in question is a Land Rover. (2004 Land Rover. Vinyl interior. 33,000 miles. No sun roof. If you’re interested.)

It is a big black behemoth that stands more than six feet tall, weighs 6,724 pounds and gets, according to E.P.A. calculations, 11 miles to the gallon in the city, assuming you don’t go uphill, stop at stop signs or run the air conditioning.

If you do any of these things, the gas mileage, according to my calculations, falls by about half.

“You always exaggerate,” my husband Max always complains.

I don’t think I do.

I haven’t actually made a formal study of the Land Rover’s gas mileage. I’ve simply stopped driving the car to anywhere other than our metro stop (1.5 miles; about a quarter tank of gas) or the supermarket (.88 miles, maybe an eighth of a tank of gas) or the gas station. Last Sunday, needing to transport a camp trunk, we drove it to Virginia, which was costly (96 miles, perhaps 1,800 tanks of gas), but highly worthwhile, because the driveway leading up to the camp’s welcome area was gravelly and steep.

“She loves this terrain,” Max said, patting the dashboard.

Why on earth did we buy a car like this?

Well, a lot of people once did. In fact, until late 2004, a lot of people went out of their way to buy precisely these monsters because -– if you can believe it -– the government actually offered a tax break for buying a car that weighed over 6,000 pounds if you were self-employed and needed it to transport heavy work machinery. Like farm equipment. Or a laptop.

But that’s not why we bought ours.

We bought our Land Rover because our friends had one. They were fun, attractive, athletic kinds of people, and it seemed to us that that they had a fun, attractive, athletic kind of a car. A swashbuckling kind of a car. With its extra-high roof rack, its khaki-colored interior, its front end that looked like the face of a panther, their Land Rover looked like it could take you away from Safeway and out on safari.

Our car — a 1997 Ford Explorer, grabbed on impulse right off the used car lot (wide-bodied seats! cup holders everywhere!) in our first, jet-lagged, giddy days on the ground in America after almost six years overseas — had died.

And at a time in our lives when our greatest risk-taking consisted in eating off salad bars (Stop! Think of the girls! a voice rang out in my ears today, as my hand hovered, ever so briefly, over the shrimp salad), the Land Rover made life an adventure. The windshield was so high! The blind spot was so wide! The back window so very useless, blocked almost entirely by the spare tire that hung, jauntily, sportily, on the outside! Merely shifting into reverse was an adrenaline rush.

If the Explorer was a car for getting fat in, slurping Big Gulps as your butt expanded to fill the velvety seats, the Land Rover was a car for beating back middle age. Honked at by, say, a mean-looking guy in a convertible as you paused to let traffic pass before making a right turn on red, you could smile, approximate sight through the rear-view mirror and think, Go ahead, make my day. I could crush you like a bug. (Which you could. Which you’d nearly done to a number of smaller cars that had had the misfortune to park right behind you.)

You felt untouchable.

Oh, how are the mighty fallen now.

These days, the Land Rover spends all week in the garage next to the metro station. Every weekend, it sits outside our house, its great cat face gone dim.

I’ve been feeling quite sorry for it.

But last weekend, I came up with a plan.

Our friends, the friends who inspired the Land Rover purchase, recently bought a beautiful new home. It has a guest house. We’re invited to come and stay anytime.

Thinking this over on the long, costly ride back from Virginia on Sunday, I suddenly had a vision: We could park the Land Rover in our backyard. We could take out the seats, put in twin beds and a mini Portosan, and, ipso-presto: we could have a guest house, too.

“An in-law suite,” Max enthused.

This encouraged me.

I thought on: Why not, finally, enlarge Emilie’s room? We could put the car on stilts, remove the back door, line it up outside her window and give her the additional play space — already carpeted — that she needs. (She wants a tree house, too. Easy-peasy: Run up a ladder, and open a door.)

Alternatively: We’ve long wanted a larger dining room. But bumping out the back of the house is too expensive. We could, instead, ram it in. Drive the car, at top speed, into the dining room. Its trunk could be built-in buffet space. All-American, with a sporty, permanent tailgate theme.

Or: the government could just buy back our Land Rover. They could make us a gun-buyback kind of a deal. We’d bring the car in, no questions asked. Perhaps it could be recycled for use in the Iraqi desert. (“She loves the sand.”) We’d get a little reward – the downpayment, perhaps, on a Prius or a Mini Cooper.

I think that these are good ideas.

I think that any one of these very visible, easily replicable, greatly inspiring, teachable examples of large-scale recycling could go a long way toward repaying our debt to society for having bought the big gas guzzler in the first place. At the very least, they should earn us a tax break.

What, you have a problem with the idea of our government subsidizing selfish, wasteful, short-sighted people?

Don’t make me laugh.5555!!!

Well, PeterH61, Although Land Rover has been owned variously be several British companies, BMW, Ford and now Tata Motors, the Land Rover is still a British-designed car made chiefly in Britain. So I guess there's no shortage of selfish, wasteful and short-sighted people in your neck of the woods either.

Well, Bruce ........ you made me laugh today

very funny and I like the ideas actually but can we do a car jump into a tree to make a tree house instead? it would be at least be a great video for youtube! hahaha