Detroit's Segway To The Future

THIS COULD BE YOU SOON!


THIS WAS MINE IN 1972



Rick Newman of U.S. News and World Report recently commented on what he felt were the most egregious blunders made in Detroit over the last, say forty years. These blunders, he feels, have led us to the brink of disaster in the auto industry, wallowing in the wake of Asian car makers who have long known the value of an inexpensive, small automobile made with quality. What do we get from Detroit today? the new two-person P.U.M.A. concept vehicle: basically a two-person Segway. This vehicle is merely a concept, but is this the best General Motors can do? Yes, I know the Volt is coming: plug-in hybrid...for $40,000. Can anyone but a laid off executive afford this? Anyway, back to what drove Detroit down.
If you are old enough, you'll recognize the second vehicle as a Ford Pinto, circa 1972; this was Ford's response to Toyota and Honda: an inexpensive car for the masses. Unfortunately, Ford neglected the "quality" part in constructioon. It also forgot to put the gas tank somewhere so it would not explode during a rear-end collision...which it did so frequently that Ford had to recall the model. I, however, had just graduated from college and with new teaching contract in hand for the princely sum of $6,000 per annum, waltzed into Broeckert Brothers in St. Nazianz and ordered a new Pinto from Art. At $1800. it was a bit pricey for a new teacher, but I was enamored with my newfound wealth and wanted a new set of wheels...and a Pinto was all I could afford. Remember the aforementioned rear-end collision? Well, I was involved in one and lived to tell the story, thanks to the religious bent of my mother's family.
My wife and I were teaching near Wichita, Kansas, and were about to head home for Thanksgiving dinner when Mom called and asked if I'd pick up one of her sisters in the city and bring her along for dinner. One of her sisters was Sister Helen (in fact, all six of her sisters were nuns at one point!), and I assented to the task being the good son that I was trying to be. As we sat in a line of traffic at a stoplight outside an aircraft manufacturing plant prior to picking Sister Helen up, a Chevy Caprice came roaring out of the parking lot and smacked my Pinto into something of an accordion shape, banging me into the car idling in front (I had to get out to see what hit me since the rear view mirror was missing--detached from the windshield by my head, as it turned out); The result, fortunately, was not a fireball, but a totalled Ford Pinto (it was only later that this model began to explode with regularity. Of course, those people were not on a mission from God as were Jake, Elwood, and myself.
I often think of how absolutely fortunate we were not to be crispy critters that day. In case you're wondering, the next car was a Dodge Demon: from divine to devilish all in one week!
So, Detroit's blind insistence that we have huge cars has led us to the brink of everyine puttering around at 35 m.p.h. on the latest Segway model. Of course, my friend George at The Villages already drives a golf cart everywhere so he won't mind. Me? I've survived one near-death experience in a Pinto. I'm driving a Toyota (which, by the way, is a palindrome: "a Toyota" printed backwards is "atoyoTa."
Cool, huh?