Mother Earth Vs. Internal Combustion

Let me say right from the start of this post that I love Mother Earth. No really, I do. She provides me with all sorts of things I need like air to breathe, water to cool me down on a hot summer day, and probably most importantly, tasty creatures like swine, bovine and several species of endangered birds to eat. Mother Earth is good to me.

INTERNAL COMBUSTION VS. THE OTHER JUNK

Despite this, I am concerned about how zealous everyone is getting over this whole “save-the-environment” thing of late. I’ve got no problem with companies like Mitsubishi attempting to create an environmentally sound and power delivering package like they’ve done with the new Evo X, however I am concerned as to all this other psycho-technical malarkey that’s going along with it - things like hydrogen fueled vehicles, electric powered cars and the like.

I’ve been pondering as to what the late-model car modifying scene will be like in perhaps 20 or 30 years. Instead of bolting turbochargers on cars, will we be installing higher capacity batteries, or heavier gauge electrical cabling to better carry the current to the drive motors built into the very wheels of our cars?

Will people like me and you still exist? Will there even be a market for fossil-fuel burning transport anymore? Or will it become like some kind of ancient relic from the past, a hobby that’s partaken in by a select few, kinda like those guys around today who spend insane amuounts of money maintaining historic steam engines and then plodding around in them just for the utter joy of it.

Will that be me in 30 years? Will people like us be looked upon as freaks; relics from an era long passed? Though instead of a steam engine we’ll be cowering in our hermetically-sealed garages maintaining a then-historical R34 GT-R or something. And by then I’d assume we’ll be buying petrol for our cars in some kind of black market trade as any kind of combustable fuel will most likely have been outlawed or cost in excess of $500 USD per litre.

If that’s the way the world is going, It’s not something I want to be a part of. I don’t want some zero-emission, hyper-industrial hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that propels itself using an electric motor in each wheel housing and only produces the sound of your elated thoughtwaves which you project as a result of creating a better world with your special mode of transport.

I want to burn fossil fuel. I want to feel the resonant vibrations created by the engine flowing through my seat and into my scrotum as I plant my right foot into the floor. I want to smell the quasi-sweet odour of spent gases as they exit the rear of the car but most of all, I want to hear that utterly-joyous trumpeting of a BOV sounding its presence to the world as it ejects compressed air back into the atmosphere from whence it came.

Quite simply, I want internal combustion. I’m a testosterone-fueled organism and it’s in my genetic makeup to want to burn, destroy, maim, conquer and pillage, and that fits right in with internal combustion. I mean really, how much satisfaction are you going to get from an electric car?

And before you get on your high-horse, I know that electric cars have the potential to accelerate much faster than anything we’ve created so far with any kind of internal combustion engine, but where’s the character? Where’s the noise, the feeling, the whole ceremony of it all? It’s like the soulless bastard-child of a Scalextric racing set and an LCD TV. I sure as hell know I don’t want that.

Really, should we care so much about the environment anyway? Either the Americans, Russians or Koreans are going to nuke the planet, a terrorist group will unleash a virus so potent it will wipe out humanity, or some kind of scientific organisation will inadvertantly create a black hole in a lab which will suck all reality into another plane of existence where we’ll all end up being the food of a hyper-intelligent species of insect robots. We’re screwed anyway.

And how ironic - Audioslave’s Gasoline just began playing on my iTunes. So on that note, can’t we just leave the futuristic mumbo-jumbo and burn fuel while we can?

- Leon.