Mark Krotov has been attending car-industry shows for more than 30 years; I can’t imagine he’s always felt this despondent about it. But his glumness is warranted (and, thankfully, very entertaining). Reporting from the New York International Auto Show—amid many digs at terribly designed cars—Krotov sets out a compelling case that most of these vehicles aren’t driving toward ecological prudence, but are instead enacting the worst of American urges. Not the most welcoming headline, but a hell of a read.
“It drives so much smaller than it really is,” I overheard an Infiniti QX80 salesperson tell a couple of potential customers. Immediately this stood out to me as one of the truest and most ambiguous claims anyone could make about life in the 21st century. Electrification is a real if unstable trend, and decrossoverification is probably not nothing, but the story that matters above all others is that cars continue to get bigger, even as that size is mitigated by all kinds of refinements. For a recent trip I needed to rent a car with six seats and was upgraded by Thrifty to an eight-seat Chevy Tahoe, which also drove much smaller than it really is. At nearly six thousand pounds, the thing was smooth and nimble: easy to accelerate, easy to steer through the Taconic State Parkway’s precarious curves, and easy to forget the smaller and more vulnerable cars—and their passengers—in the other lanes. I don’t think that any of this constitutes progress. Size inflation has been normalized to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to appreciate the enormity of American cars. The desire for status, the desire for height, a fragile and increasingly attenuated relationship to masculinity, the global war on terror, the rise of safety-consciousness, a legal regime that has made the production of fuel-inefficient vehicles far more appealing to car manufacturers than smaller and more eco-conscious ones—all these have been held responsible for the rise of the SUV and all these are indeed responsible. But the desire to wall oneself off from the world, to float above degraded infrastructure and the threat of violence even as one contributes to both: this is an explanatory factor that shouldn’t be underrated.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/nmNok6B
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI
