Power Hungry Americans

[jzwahlen at cerrejon.com]

Jazman here.  I just wanted to share my thought about power
hungry americans.

The good old US of A simply is not a conservative place.
Part of it has its roots in good values like freedom and
creativity, but some of it is plain old wastefulness.  

One explanation why the US male craves a bigger engine and
more power is simply a desire to be one up on the other guy.
It's the competitive mindset of the free market culture.
Never mind that sometimes refinement and efficiency are far
more advanced than brute power.  But sometimes these
qualities are hard to quantify.  It's very easy to compare
with your competitor the number of valves, number of
cylinders, torque figures, number of forward gears, and of
course number of HP.  Sometimes bigger is not better, but
that's more difficult to explain subjectively.  Even though
the A6 4.2 has 300HP, the A6 2.7T at 250HP is slightly
faster, primarily because the 4.2 has to haul around a
bigger hunk of metal in the engine compartment, and all of
the upgraded creature features.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s there was the perverted view in
the US that a car that was an inch longer in the hood or
trunk (not the passenger compartment, mind you, but just
another inch of metal) was a superior car to shorter ones!
The Big 3 actually advertised that their models were "a full
inch longer, than our competition"!  Hmmmm

Freudian, and a
subconscious attack on masculinity, don't you think?  May
God help the US Male help himself.

Necessity is another reason.  In Europe, the price of fuel
is double that in the US, primarily because of government
taxes which, in part, have been used to build some of the
world best mass transportation, thereby taking much of the
burden off the crowded roads.  The higher gas prices
encourage fuel conservation.  It really gripes me in the US
when people start to bitch about high gas prices.  Gasoline
today, after adjusted for inflation, is cheaper than it was
20 years ago.  In 1973 when the gas crisis hit, gasoline
went from 30 cents to 75 cents a gallon.  This is when the
minimum wage was 65 cents an hour.  Indexed to the price of
the minimum wage (today at $5.25, I think), this would
equate to gas prices jumping from $2.42/gallon to
$6.06/gallon!!!  People today will pay a $1.50/liter for
bottled water ($6.00/gallon) and bitch about gasoline at
$2.00/gallon, and petroleum is a limited resource and is not
recycled like water.   And then they climb in their SUVs
which if luck get 18 mpg (but may only get 8 mpg) and then
drive one tenth of a mile to the grocery to pick up the milk
that they forget 10 minutes ago.  

The quaint towns of Europe were build before the automobile;
the roads simply aren't wide enough to hold two American
luxo-barges.  Parking space is a premium.  An Audi A3 or VW
Polo is worth it's weigh in gold in a crowded parking space.
And many people don't own cars in Europe.  They walk or
bike, or take the train-partly out of necessity, and partly
because they have not gotten hooked on the drug of cheap
petroleum and the unlimited freedom of movement that the car
gives a driver.

One of my biggest fears in the US is that this freedom of
movement will proliferate to the point of clogging our roads
to the point we won't be able to drive about 35mph.  Maybe
we should moderate the desire to waste fuel though higher
gas taxes, which in turn could be used for mass transit so
that the drivers among us will have a place to drive our
cars.

Don't get me wrong, I love powerful, fast cars.  I hope to
have an A6 4.2 or 2.7T someday.   Maybe even an S4.   But
where the Audis shine is that they wring the power and
torque out of small displacement engines.  And then they
build strong but light bodies to further get better
performance for the same ounce of fuel.  Efficiency, that's
the real buzz we should be high on, not raw HP or the
greatest displacement.

In the US we should be thankful we have the freedom of
choice, hopefully we will not lose this freedom because of
congested streets, or laws that limit the size of the
engine, or because gasoline has become so scarce that it's
not available.