Everything wrong in the world is either the fault of the automobile, racism, or a Wonder Twins pairing of the two. “The decline of Detroit,” he intones, “has many causes. Dysfunctional government is one, racism another, corruption a third. But all of them are linked to the automobile.” He leans heavily on the apocryphal tale about Robert Moses building bridges to keep black families away from the beach and then ascribes the demonstrated preference of most human beings for private transportation to a sinister and all-too-familiar motivation: “In your car, you do not have to share space with somebody of another color.”
“Outdoor air pollution kills half as many people each year as coronavirus did … yet we shut down our economies to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.” Ah, but his eventual resolution is not that COVID-19 was handled in a hysterical fashion, but rather that we should shut down the rest of our economy to stop the evil cars. Perhaps his most delightfully fanciful conclusion is that people left cities during the ’70s and ’80s because of, you guessed it, pollution from the leaded gasoline used in urban cars. As someone who was born in New York City, I would suggest that the rapidity with which cars were stolen there during the ’70s was perhaps a larger factor in people wanting to leave than whatever came out of the tailpipes of those stolen cars, but perhaps that is naive.
Call it house-cat blindness, perhaps. Knowles and Grabar can see the evils of the car, which are admittedly myriad and diverse, but they have no genuine feeling for why people might willingly subject themselves to those evils. Knowles thinks it is an expression of structural racism, while Grabar regards it as a sort of childish irrationality based on laziness and unwillingness to walk anywhere.
“In no way am I unusual,” Knowles pleads, detailing his unwillingness to drive himself. “There are millions of stories like mine.” Of course there are! The meek, like the poor, will be with us always.
YET, the auto manufacturers send these hating fools review cars and invite them on trips. Because somehow, these idiot woke execs and pr people in the auto biz have FORGOTTEN they won’t have a JOB if they don’t SELL CARS. Rather than making EVERY decision revolve around that and empower those who DO love cars and have outlets where people end up BUYING THEIR CARS, they somehow think their job is to follow the exact system of casting for a Disney movie in 2023 and invite those who hit the PROPER check boxes.
The most depressing part? Like a frog being heated slowly in a pot, they’ll bankrupt themselves before they wake up and change course.
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