What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
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   Friday, June 02, 2006

   BORN TO BE WIRED

I love, love, love electric cars. Or even the gas hybrid ones. They're like those incredibly-rare well-behaved children. While the others are making grinding noises and spitting up oil, they just cutely putter along, quietly and neatly, taking up little space. Everyone should have one.

But they DO take some getting used to. You glide along in near-silence -- the absense of the motor noise is somehow deafening -- and the jury's still out on how safe or effective they are for cross-country travel. Darcy and I wanted to take one down to Georgia last December but we felt it probably made more sense to go with a small-but-solid sedan. In the city, though, the cars are pretty damn cool.

Even cooler are the new breed of geek machanics who hack their hybrids. It seems that Toyota Prius owners who aren't 100% happy with some of the design features in their otherwise-sensible little cars are cracking the codes and making some tweaks:

"It's the new breed of hot-rodders," said Phillip Torrone, an associate editor at do-it-yourself tech journal Make Magazine. "In the 1950s, it was all about getting more speed. Now, instead of getting more horsepower, it's about getting more miles per gallon. So your hot-rodders are going to be your hot-greeners."

Now there's a competition I can rally behind:

JAMES DEAN [leaning back against a brick wall]:
How many miles you drive on that one tank?

COREY ALLEN [glaring at him with hatred/homoerotic tension]:
Eighty. Got all the way to San Luis Ray.

JAMES DEAN [with a short, snorting laugh]:
Pussy. I went ninety-five.

That would be infinitely preferable to the automotive competition North America is losing:

A Ford Motor Co. plant in Atlanta and a General Motors Corp. facility in Oshawa, Ont., led the [productivity] rankings in the annual Harbour Report, released yesterday by Harbour Consulting, an automotive consulting firm whose yearly study is watched closely in the industry.

The closings of two plants that topped the Harbour list -- as measured by hours needed to assemble a vehicle -- are a sign of the times for the two auto makers, said Canadian Auto Workers union president Buzz Hargrove.

"When you don't have the market share, you don't have the new products, [so] the best plant doesn't mean anything at that point," said Mr. Hargrove, whose members are trying to persuade GM to build a leading-edge, flexible manufacturing operation in Oshawa.

But owners of Toyota electric cars are both irritated enough and enthusiastic enough about their foreign-import cars to do their own home-mechanic hackwork? If that doesn't seem like an opportunity to the Big Three in Detroit, they've got to get their eyes off the rearview mirror.

Labels: Canada