Re: "Electrify" Old Cars? Why?

Posted by su8overdrive On 2023/7/24 13:11:32

If you're decrying electrifying old cars, we're with you for the same reason we loathe "retro rods" and the rest of the nonsense. Either have an old, vintage, "Classic," collector, Edwardian, brass, special interest original, or buy something new. Not a fan of what Tim Cole aptly sums "junk rods" or Frankencars.

But let's not live in the past or slam new technology. James Ward Packard, George Westinghouse, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others didn't, or we wouldn't have Packards or be on this or any website today.

Let's not lament "free" energy, either, because because as you observe, there's no such thing, and all energy has its costs. Car & Driver magazine awarded Tesla their Car of the Year award awhile back, and C&D has for years pandered to the "eco-weenie" hating redneck contingent who think there's something manly about bombing around the 'burbs in a noisy, pristine, always empty pick up truck fashion statement. A friend has a Tesla. It is a magnificent conveyance whatever its propulsive force.

Again, if we're serious about a future in which internal combustion cars don't remain the whipping boy for the "round up the usual suspects" crowd, perhaps we listen to the world's scientists, who agree in every poll, including one a decade ago of 2,000 UN scientists, another of 11,000 reported in the 11/5/19 Bloomberg News, that overpopulation remains our by far biggest problem, their words "bigger than climate."

Meanwhile, UN and other vetted studies show animals raised for meat and dairy create more greenhouse gas than all the world's cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships combined.

So if we're serious, instead of attacking EVs, going the us/them route, or dismissing anything we don't want to face as "politics," we revise our antiquated, agrarian tax code from when more babies meant more hands to work the family farm, half of all children not surviving beyond age four, to instead encourage (not mandate) having "one or none," and adopting. We also follow the lead of Lewis Hamilton, the world's leading Formula One driver, in adopting a plant-based, vegan diet, a win-win-win because until people control what they ingest, health care public or private will never be affordable.

Simple, if not EZ. Packards were once driven by Supreme Court justices, university presidents, leaders, writers, scholars, Walter Damrosch, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leading choice of the world's embassies. Instead of parsing, equivocating, debating, buck-passing, let's get cracking.

This is a hobby for many of us embracing both the best of the past and the present. Carly Simon sang truth in "....these are the good old days."