It’s pretty standard to speak about hybrid cars without offering up much in the way of a counterargument. Basically, we are meant to appreciate their everyday presence and nothing more. But I worry about the future more than I used to. I guess things are okay for now, as people start the tough process of getting off foreign oil; weening, siphoning and guzzling at their leisure. Like any addiction, there are good days and bad ones. Times you succumb to temptation and idle for hours in front of a sputtering hydrant. What happens down the road, when the landscape is mostly full of these pesky, kind of useful hybrids?
I fear for those days more than anything. Few people want to discuss how cars are made. It is our nation’s dirty little secret. We can thank Henry Ford for gifting us the assembly line. Car manufacturing is simple. Think of it. Cars, like people, depreciate over time, but they aren’t useless at the end. Some are able to run for millions of miles, while others have trouble pulling out of the dealership. A new car is made after two old cars fall in love. If not love, something akin to fleeting affection. Cars make cars. But hybrids offer a dilemma. Imagine if the Belmont Stakes was run exclusively by mules. Mules, while good at carrying heavy things and having a fine disposition despite their existential malaise, cannot procreate.
The same is true of hybrid cars. They are the result of the forbidden love between a gas car and an electric one. Do we really want bicycles on the interstate? Because that’s what will happen in fifty years when every old car has made the trek to Florida for rusty retirement.
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