CS, I dearly love the passion with which you speak of those cars. I don't know what the "hundred dollar bill test" is and I'm afraid to ask.
---Simply put, it's a motorhead rite of passage.
If you think your hot rod is fast, tape a hundred dollar bill
to the dashboard, mark off a section of road (drag strip)
and invite your passenger to try and get the hundred dollar bill while you go through the gears at full throttle.
If they can get the bill off the dashboard before you hit the finish line, it's theirs.
Still, I feel it behooves me to say that, well, that passion for speed and power in automobiles is one of the major problems we need to overcome now. And it's deeply rooted in a certain percentage of Americans. It's why that Dodge Ram sign says "It ate a luxury car."
--Consider yourself behooved. The passion for speed and power in vehicles doesn't have to change, the choice of fuel does.
If a vehicle owner can derive significant power from a fuel choice that doesn't negatively impact our dependence on foreign oil then no harm and no foul, except to the vehicle owner's pocketbook, of course.
Our problem is that we've become too dependent on petroleum. Suffice it to say that if we really DO find a way out of the petroleum monopoly and wind up with electric cars, and possibly the solar panels to charge them with, you WILL see
enthusiasts slapping extra capacitors on their battery packs and swapping out stock electric motors for larger ones, and you will see electric drag racing, hopefully on the drag strip and not on the street.
In short, it is no longer a positive attribute, and maybe hasn't been for some time.
---There's no way human nature can be altered to fit inside a
non-sportive frame of mind. Mankind is hard wired with the desire to push the envelope. It's the kind of thing that inspired test pilots to conquer space as astronauts and that's what drove us to the moon, which resulted in the technology we use today. The part of the attribute that isn't positive is the stubborn refusal to push the envelope in terms of power sources.
We heard as small children about the fact that the sun showers the earth with millions of times more energy in an hour than the entire planet uses in a year.
So why are we mortgaging the buried sunshine of 65 million years ago instead of tapping the source directly?
The answer back when we were kids was that we didn't have the knowhow. We have most of the knowhow now, and it is incumbent upon us to take the challenge and rise to it.
Civilization won't survive without gobs of energy.
If certain folks dislike civilization they're certainly welcome to leave it but I suspect that most people will want to strive to figure out a way to keep most of it by finding new ways to provide the power that it needs.
Another cultural issue (and this is one I'm guilty of) is the love of the road trip; the "don't fence me in" attitude. We tend to think it's part of the American soul but, in reality, it's more likely a product of the American cinema...these lusts (so to speak) need to be redirected if Americans are going to start looking at cars as actual utilitarian tools, and not wallet, sex appeal, and or body part extensions.
---Again, you're denying the hardwired tendency of the peacock to display his feathers, and the tendency of a Columbus to embark on a journey to the edge of what was thought to be a flat planet. The American cinema didn't create wanderlust, it celebrated it. What we need to do is find a way to wander without being destructive in the process.
If mankind can figure out a way to power his civilization and it's attendant luxuries in an efficient manner, the rewards of civilization will continue to be enjoyed.
If not, we can expect to see a New Dark Ages commence.
That wouldn't be good.
Hmm. Extensions. Maybe an SUV is like an extension -- a bad weave makes your hair fall out, and too many SUVs makes your auto manufacturers go under.
---A gasoline guzzling SUV without a doubt.
But what if that SUV was diesel electric and got 45 miles per gallon?
What if that SUV was low to the ground for everyday transportion and got even more than 45 miles to the gallon in daily driver mode, thanks to streamlined aerodynamics and an advanced alternative energy powertrain?
My entire point is that mankind is an adventurous species, and like all other animals mankind also preens and displays in order to make themselves seem more attractive to the opposite sex.
Mankind seeks adventure in many fulfilling ways but there will always be that part of the species that is compelled to wander and explore. The value which we impart from that is subject to
debate of course but then again in any species there is normally a little thing called natural selection which political correctness attempts to disengage from the process.
The result is several hundred million people who think that they all deserve to be winners, winners who take no risk and suffer no pain from mistakes lest their fragile egos or even more fragile bodies suffer harm.
In classical mythology Icarus tried to fly to the sun on waxy wings. He paid a price for his ignorance. Today, Icarus be damned...let's make the world safe for everybody no matter their ignorance, wastefulness or wantonness.
But in the old days it was the adventurer who discovered gold, who learned to harness energy to power a new society, who learned to break the bonds that held us close to the plow and the broken backs and mangled hands of dirt labor subsistence.
We again face a new barrier, a new frontier in which we must cast off our conventional wisdom about mankind's relationship to energy.
It's been suggested that society challenge itself and take the first step into the void and shine a light on the possibility of decentralized creation of personal energy sources instead of depending on large monolithic corporations who dribble expensive finite resources into our outstretched cups.
I say we accept.
