By Peter M. DeLorenzo
Detroit. While the Sturm und Drang continues over the transition to Battery Electric Vehicles, the pushback from people who either don’t believe it will ever happen or don’t believe that it should happen seems to be gaining strength by the day. The reasons are many: The infrastructure isn’t there and won’t be there for years to come. Range continues to be a perceived problem. Charging remains an issue, both for the time it takes and because it in fact excludes apartment dwellers en masse. The list goes on from there. Some people are just disinclined to entertain BEVs under any circumstance, when it comes right down to it.
And I get it, I really do. As someone who grew up immersed in some of the finest high-performance ICE machines ever built, envisioning a world that doesn’t echo with the sound of hungry V8s rumbling across the landscape is simply hard to imagine.
But then again, as I’ve said repeatedly, those machines will be around for decades to come. They will be collected, nurtured and preserved indefinitely. And that is a very good thing from my perspective.
And I’m not calling it “The Grand Transition” for nothing. It’s not as if your local Donuts, Lotto ‘n Gas station is going to disappear overnight, taken over by charging islands. It is going to take time. A long time. But it’s also clear that for a large portion of the driving population, BEVs will become a staple in every geographical region here in the United States. And I am fine with that.
But even with BEVs, I see the car “thing” continuing. The onset of BEVs doesn’t mean that the car “thing” will go away. In fact, it might be a good time to take a step back and understand what this car “thing” has meant to this nation.
How did the car “thing” evolve from desiring faster horses, to the building of transportation that transformed the world? What propelled the automobile from being an extravagant convenience to a cultural touchstone that’s such an inexorable part of the American fabric that even the most hostile of the anti-car hordes can’t seem to dampen our collective enthusiasm for it?
Is it the fashion statement? The fundamental sense of motion and speed? The image-enhancing power that automobiles possess? Or all of the above?
If anything, I keep going back to the one thing that’s undeniable about our collective love for the automobile, the one thing that no computer simulation - no matter how powerful or creatively enhanced - can compete with. And that is the freedom of mobility. And that will not change in the upcoming BEV era.
The ability to go and do, coupled with the freedom to explore and experience is not only a powerful concept, it is fundamental to the human experience, which is why the automobile in all of its forms remains so compelling and undeniably intoxicating.
That the automobile has progressed from a device built around convenience and comfort to something more, much more, is easy to understand. The rush of freedom that we’ve all experienced in our first solo drives in an automobile is something that cannot be duplicated or brushed aside. It is ingrained in our spirit and etched in our souls.
I have talked to the most strident anti-car people over the years. But even for those who merely like to inform me that “I’m not into cars” inevitably, after acknowledging that it’s fine that they don’t share my passion for the automobile, something very interesting happens.
If the conversation is allowed to percolate long enough, every single anti-car person I have encountered in going on twenty-two years of doing Autoextremist.com comes around to saying something like, “Well, there was this one car that my uncle (or aunt, or friend, or brother, or father, or grandfather, etc.) had that I’ll never forget…” And they then proceed to tell me about a car that is so indelibly carved in their memories that they start talking about it in detail, including where they were, how old they were, who was with them, where they were going, what happened, etc., etc., etc.
For even those most dispassionate about the automobile – at least on the surface anyway – I find there are always stories if you dig a little deeper. Stories of coming of age, of adventure, of harrowing close calls, of love, and life and lives lived. And memories. Countless, colorful memories that live on forever.
The automobile business itself can be mind-numbingly tedious at times, as I’ve well-documented over the years. And it is without question one of the most complicated endeavors on earth, made up of so many nuanced ingredients that it almost defies description. But the creation of machines that are safe, reliable, beautiful to look at, fun to drive, versatile or hard working – depending on the task they’re designed for – is more than just a cold, calculated business. It is and has been an industrial art form that has come to define who we are collectively.
The automobile obviously means more to me than it does for most. I grew up immersed in this business, and the passionate endeavor surrounding the creation of automotive art has never stopped being interesting for me. And it is very much art, by the way. Emotionally involving and undeniably compelling mechanical art that not only takes us where we want to go but moves us in ways that still touches our souls deeply.
As I’ve reminded everyone many times over the years, I for one will never forget the essence of the machine, and what makes it a living, breathing mechanical conduit of our hopes and dreams.
One of our favorite pieces of automotive prose was written by poet, critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, James Agee. It appeared in a piece he wrote for Fortune in September 1934. You can read the entire passage below, but this is the part of it that resonates the most for us:
"Whatever we may think, we move for no better reason than for the plain unvarnished hell of it. And there is no better reason.”
For the plain unvarnished hell of it, indeed.
And that’s the High-Electron Truth for this week.
The characters in our story are five: this American continent; this American people; the automobile; the Great American Road, and the Great American Roadside. As an American, of course, you know these characters. This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky against the bulk of the world. This curious people. The automobile you know as well as you know the slouch of the accustomed body at the wheel and the small stench of gas and hot metal. You know the sweat and the steady throes of the motor and the copious and thoughtless silence and the almost lack of hunger and the spreaded swell and swim of the hard highway toward and beneath and behind and gone and the parted roadside swarming past. This great road, too; you know that well. How it is scraggled and twisted along the coast of Maine, high-crowned and weak-shouldered in honor of long winter, how like a blacksnake in the sun it takes the ridges, the green and dim ravines which are the Cumberlands, and lolls loose into the hot Alabama valleys . . . Oh yes, you know this road….All such things you know….God and the conjunction of confused bloods, history and the bullying of this tough continent to heel, did something to the American people -- worked up in their blood a species of restiveness unlike any that any race before has known. Whatever we may think, we move for no better reason than for the plain unvarnished hell of it. And there is no better reason. So God made the American restive. The American in turn and in due time got into the automobile and found it good. The automobile became a hypnosis, the opium of the American people...
-James Agee