22. Vehicle
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” – B. F. Skinner
Henry Ford was the man most responsible for getting cars on the road. He wanted to create a vehicle to replace the horse and buggy as a transportation device. Henry worked on it and had a few failures but soon came up with his car. His goal was to make it affordable to the common man – a vehicle that the people could buy without going to the track and having to pick a winner. He wasn’t the only one designing this conveyance, just the most famous in doing so.
Henry was progressive and a revolutionary as he paid his employees better than that of his competitors – wages at the plant may even have been above that of most of the industry. In January 1915, he doubled the salary of his workers by instituting a minimum wage of $5 per day. He still made money. Ford is to be applauded for thinking about the everyday person in the price of his car. Of course, he wasn’t adverse to a bit of fame and fortune. He certainly wasn’t happy with the attempts by the union for higher wages in later years.
Many great things resulted from the automobile. People could live on the outskirts of the city and still work there. Families could go on vacation and see the National Parks by way of their vehicles. The car meant that people with shovels didn’t need to follow a four-legged animal like Rusty in order for people to walk on the street without shoe cleanup. If you don’t know whom Rusty refers to, you missed the marble rye episode of Seinfeld, one of my favorites.
I doubt that Henry worried about pollution although he probably promoted his four-wheeler as a better alternative to the horse with its numerous deposits, which needed attention. He achieved his mission, but his problems weren’t completely resolved. Ford didn’t care to have the cost of building a car being more than he could sell it for. This took some effort but eventually his ideas reaped benefits, using assembly line production methods. His profit per sale was minimal but because his company sold so many vehicles, in the long run, he was a huge financial success. He soon was in the same class of corporate thieves, whose names I will leave out here. The term robber baron came about in the nineteenth century, applying to businessmen who amassed great wealth by exploiting the workers, doing so without scruples. A baron represents an individual who exercises power illegitimately in a republic, trying to achieve a monopoly of an industry. Robber is a synonym for crook, thief or criminal. I think you get the idea.
With those vehicles came the development of road systems and eventually the interstate highways. Later on, road rage reared its ugly head, which we might not have seen with just ten-speed bicycles or horses. Ford inadvertently introduced planned obsolescence along with used car dealers – more of my favorite people – since his company produced so many cars. Don’t forget about the jobs created collecting tolls and at the collision shops. Growing up, my family and I spent every Sunday at my mom’s mother’s home with grandma and grandpa, the uncles, aunts and cousins. That family get-together is a rare occurrence today with so many people on the move. If it happens at all, it certainly isn’t a weekly event. Ford’s invention resulted in the decay of the family. Communities suffered and we witnessed the disintegration of the cities and sprawl of the suburbs.
I’ve owned a dozen different cars, almost equally new and used – some dealers try to sell more vehicles by calling them pre-owned. I’m not impressed. In my other books I described a few of my cars, so here I’ll talk about some of the others, the ones that were a challenge to own. The first was before the 1970s, a Chevy II Nova. It was small with four cylinders, but the tradeoff was better mileage than other cars without needing to be pushed up hills. I mentioned this used automobile earlier in moving to New Jersey. There were a few problems, including an issue or two that many mechanics couldn’t solve. That may be why we trade cars in. Let the dealer worry about it. I replaced it with a Chevelle that I only kept for two years because of the bad mileage. My father had a much larger Chevrolet, an Impala, which might have floated, but the mileage for his exceeded mine even though both cars had the same engine.
Exchanging my Chevelle brought a nice trade-in so I bought a new Audi Super 90. That number is the speed you can travel the highways without being stopped by the authorities. I doubt that, but I loved the car with the four-speed manual transmission, which people claimed could drive 99 miles per hour. I never tried moving that fast because of astynomiaphobia. I don’t think swinophobia will get past the sensors. I had the Audi for four years and then experienced transmission difficulties. The parts were ordered but were slow in arriving. It was to the point that I had to drive with only two gears, second and fourth. Reverse was out of the equation, with which my girlfriend at the time wasn’t thrilled. I mentioned her in chapter 7 and I did the right thing in having her behind the wheel as I pushed the car into a parking space. Who needs reverse?
The vehicles I owned after these first few were an improvement but I wasn’t that impressed. For years the car / oil conspiracy disappointed many drivers. Automobiles and trucks should and can achieve better mileage than what they register today. Many people don’t even track it because they haven’t got any barf bags. Many manufacturers and dealers lie about the mileage anyway. In the past, clocking my mileage per gallon exceeded what the dealer said. That’s not true today. It was stated that the 2007 Prius was good for 51 miles on the highway and 60 in the city. It’s impossible for anyone to easily track the two numbers separately, but my overall number reached only 47 miles per gallon in two years of driving it, and I do all I can to have that number as high as possible.
I used to have a few words about Toyota on my web site, but now I only have news about the Cowrolla, which you can find if you click on the information link for my 2007 book. You can do Internet searches for indiscretions on the part of the company, including the feature of the car that allows you to really make time if there’s a shallow body of water nearby to enable stopping the Prius.
This company has many competitors and companions who do the same thing. A decade ago General Motors knew about the problem that could have been fixed with a dollar part. It wasn’t addressed until recently. They’re all alike, but what do you expect from car dealerships and salesmen? Greed has replaced dedication to the job and product as well as pride. When buying a car, perhaps the best suggestion is to make sure it’s not American or foreign.
There’s another innovation that has been good and bad concerning dealing with cars: drive-in restaurants. Using that last word to describe venues selling fast food may be an exaggeration, but at one time the menu provided something close to wholesome. It’s appears that Ford had a hand in the success of the fast food industry as he contributed to the joining of the automobile to milkshakes, hamburgers and fries, which has a great to do with overweight and obese people.
At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon.
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating the following: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would accept this, restart, and drive on.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart; in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought ‘Car95’ or ‘CarNT.’ Then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was more reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
7. The oil, water, temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single ‘general car fault’ warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same butt size.
9. The airbag system would say ‘Are you sure?’ before going off.
10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more.
12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
The Ides of March, an American fusion band from Berwyn, Illinois, released the album Vehicle in 1970 with a song that matched the disc title. The song reached the number two position on the U. S. charts. The band played for a decade and broke up in 1973 but reformed in 1990 and is still performing, but with wheelchairs and walkers. There’s also a 2011 political movie with the same name as the group, directed by George Clooney. He also stars in it with Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.