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Here is the link
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.4d60882.html

Terry Box is The News' automotive writer. His e-mail address is tbox@ dallasnews.com. A longer version of this essay appeared in The Washington Post.

My car swills gas, downing shot after shot of rich red petrol. It rumbles rudely at stoplights, scaring the Prius drivers around me. Its flinty suspension – stiff and unyielding as a tax-department bureaucrat – pounds my middle-aged back on rough roads.

How can you not bask in the power of an '07 Mustang Shelby GT - even with its excesses? But the truth is, at 57, I still delight in turning the key in my '07 Mustang Shelby GT and feeling the thunder as its 4.6-liter V-8 engine explodes into life. I relish pointing it toward what little open road is left in this part of Texas and engaging in occasional immature outbursts of, shall we say, joyful exuberance. I revel in its sounds and its power and its mechanical sensations. And I accept its excesses.

I know that my days as an unrepentant gearhead may be numbered. Sky-high gas prices, global warming, urban sprawl, maybe even the "oil war" in Iraq, are all being piled on cars. Yet despite the growing drumbeat against them, the allegations that they're melting glaciers and maiming thousands, the claim that we're choking on them, the fear that they're our worst national addiction, I love them dearly.

They are my "carma." And I refuse to go on the national guilt trip about them.

Lots of people these days see cars as mere appliances that can be re-jiggered with an electric motor or a fuel cell and sent puttering down the road like some jazzed-up can-opener on wheels. Pardon my French, but that's a bunch of donkey dust. No appliance sounds like a '67 427 Corvette or a new Ferrari F430 or a Hemi-powered '32 Ford hot rod.

But what worries me most is the rush to blame all environmental – and many societal – ills on cars. Come on, people. Lighten up.

Cars define our lives, transporting us to work, school, grocery stores, banks, malls, furtive trysts, whatever.

They envelop us in slick metal containers that supposedly say a lot about who we are. My Mustang shouts, "Short skinny guy over 50, seeking validation and maybe a couple of inches of height from a white muscle car with silver skunk stripes." Baptists and senior citizens, meanwhile, drive Buicks. Republicans prefer two trucks in the driveway: an SUV for Mom and a big $40,000 pickup for Dad. Democrats favor anything nerdy in gray or white, and plaster their battered back bumpers with pious political stickers.

Who cares whether any of those stereotypes are true? Cars R us.

Yet we've developed strong love-hate relationships with cars. Ralph Nader made us fear them. The Middle East forced us to push them to dry gas pumps in the '70s. Today's environmentalists contend that we're choking on them.

I'm not blind to the impact that cars have on the environment. On hot days, I can see some of it in the brownish-gray veil that clings to Dallas' flat horizon. But the truth is that every new car or truck today is vastly cleaner and more efficient than anything from 1996 or earlier. And yet, even though my 319-horsepower Mustang is perfectly legal and meets every modern emissions standard, cars like mine – along with big SUVs, pickups and large luxury cars – draw extreme green disdain.

If we really want to have an effect on air quality, though, we should probably quit throwing rocks at SUVs and get all the old beaters off the road. Of course, someone will have to confiscate those junkers from the mostly low-income people who drive them because they have no other practical way of getting to jobs or school.

The fact is, I do my part for the environment. I walk to places in my neighborhood that most people drive to. I try to hold off on air conditioning till mid-June. I don't watch television or keep a computer at home, so I'm using a lot less electricity than most of my friends.

I choose to drive my politically incorrect car just as some high-profile eco-activists opt to live in huge homes that consume more energy in a month than my 50-year-old bungalow does in a year. We're both profligate, I suppose. I just down mine with a heavy dose of politically charged petrol.

So how about we make a deal? If you give up your air conditioning in August, I'll surrender my sociopathic car to the green police.

Maybe.


Terry Box is The News' automotive writer. His e-mail address is tbox@ dallasnews.com. A longer version of this essay appeared in The Washington Post.

Vicious GT

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