By Daniel Rigney
What kind of fool pays $10 to walk into the world’s largest car showroom and be sales-pitched to buy cars he doesn’t need at prices he can’t afford?
Oh. That would be me.
I’ve never seen a car show before, so when I found a 48-page pullout in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle with an aggressively-grilled and menacing Cadillac SUV on the cover, I decided to ride the light rail down to Reliant Center and see what I’d been missing.
The Big H is nothing if not a car-and-carbon town, so it’s a mark of shame that this is only my first trip to the Houston Auto Show.
Here’s a sneak preview -- a car show within a car show that I found on one model exhibitor's display table:
bright, shiny objects
Reliant Center is not your grandfather’s showroom. Many of the transportation studio consultants on the floor today are young women in little black cocktail dresses. None of them is wearing a loud plaid sports coat or smoking Luckies. Within ten seconds of my arrival, one of them is offering to let me test drive a Kia. I respectfully decline. Just for fun, I pretend to be an anthropologist from Zork, visiting your strange planet to see what you Earthlings are up to in Houston, arguably the carbon capital of your world. This city exists mainly to produce and distribute the fossil fuels to which your species is addicted, as Texan George W. Bush once candidly observed.
What I find here are two-thirds of a million square feet of floor space covered with large, gleaming metallic animals on wheels – a veritable zoo-farm of automotive species in all their colorful technodiversity. There are Jaguars and Impalas, Rams and Mustangs. (“Unleash your inner Mustang.”) In the aviary of classic birds I sight a Skylark and a Thunderbird. Several earlier species, long-since extinct, are notable by their absence. The Cougar. The Colt. The Eagle. May they rest in pieces, and may they one day be restored to new life in future antique car shows and museums.
But eventually, and maybe sooner than you think, every fossil-fueled car will be known as The Dinosaur.
I also note that you Earthlings like to name your cars after elite political and business figures: Lincolns and Fords. Scions, Imperials and Regals. The Rambler Ambassador may be dead, but the Hindustani Ambassador (not on display here) is alive and rambling around Delhi.
The crowd today is about 90%+ Euro-American, 90% male, and skewing older. Most of the few attending women seem to be with their husbands. One guy has a T-shirt that reads “Great story, babe. Now go make me a sandwich.” Is the American car culture a traditional guy culture or whut?
Back on my native Zork, past, present and future are compressed into a single timepoint. I find a similar phenomenon here at your auto show. I find cars from the past (in the antique section), from the present (the rest of the show), and from hypothetical futures, all coexisting in the same contiguous space, in this year you Earthlings charmingly call “2014.”
But every car here is, in a certain sense, a “car of the future.” This 1928 Buick Speedster with a rear-mounted beer barrel gas tank, for example, was a “car of the future” in 1900.
beer barrel Buick
These 2014 models were the “cars of the future” as Earthlings imagined them in the late 1900s.
past "cars of the future"
And here's a screen image of a 2014-era designer’s idea of a “car of the future,” being sketched live and in real time by the artist, sitting behind the screen. That’s his hand in the video, upper right.
up-side-down car of our present "future"
The true cars of the future, I already know (because, as a Zorkian, I know your Earth’s future history) are small hybrid-fueled (e.g., solar-electric) and all-electric cars, which are barely featured in this vast exhibition of late-primitive carbon machines. I wish for your sake that you Earthlings had figured this out sooner. I also wish you had figured out Customized Mass Transit (CMT), but that's a story for another day.
Here’s an electric Nissan Leaf getting an electron fill-up from a convenient power stick (as you’ll come to call them). These will be as common as parking meters are now, but far more widely distributed. You'll wonder why you had to drive so far to find a gas station, and why the stations had to be so big.
fuel station of the future
This Leaf (and the Chevy Volt, and the 'smart fortwo electric') are the closest I can find in this show to the actual cars of the future. Most e-cars will be powered by electricity generated from renewable, battery-stored solar energy and thorium, made possible by dramatic advances in photovoltaics, battery storage, and thorium energy.
When the carbon economy falls, it’s going to fall hard, and Houston with it. But you don’t know that yet.
The end of the carbon age is coming sooner than you expect. Everything happens faster than expected now, including climate change and innovations in sustainable energy technology.
But that's still a dwindling few tomorrows away. Today I'm here to enjoy Houston Auto Show 2014. It's fascinating. It’s like visiting a future antique car show. Or a dinosaur museum.
Danagram
;] misremembering the future since 2011
What kind of fool pays $10 to walk into the world’s largest car showroom and be sales-pitched to buy cars he doesn’t need at prices he can’t afford?
Oh. That would be me.
I’ve never seen a car show before, so when I found a 48-page pullout in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle with an aggressively-grilled and menacing Cadillac SUV on the cover, I decided to ride the light rail down to Reliant Center and see what I’d been missing.
The Big H is nothing if not a car-and-carbon town, so it’s a mark of shame that this is only my first trip to the Houston Auto Show.
Here’s a sneak preview -- a car show within a car show that I found on one model exhibitor's display table:
bright, shiny objects
Reliant Center is not your grandfather’s showroom. Many of the transportation studio consultants on the floor today are young women in little black cocktail dresses. None of them is wearing a loud plaid sports coat or smoking Luckies. Within ten seconds of my arrival, one of them is offering to let me test drive a Kia. I respectfully decline. Just for fun, I pretend to be an anthropologist from Zork, visiting your strange planet to see what you Earthlings are up to in Houston, arguably the carbon capital of your world. This city exists mainly to produce and distribute the fossil fuels to which your species is addicted, as Texan George W. Bush once candidly observed.
What I find here are two-thirds of a million square feet of floor space covered with large, gleaming metallic animals on wheels – a veritable zoo-farm of automotive species in all their colorful technodiversity. There are Jaguars and Impalas, Rams and Mustangs. (“Unleash your inner Mustang.”) In the aviary of classic birds I sight a Skylark and a Thunderbird. Several earlier species, long-since extinct, are notable by their absence. The Cougar. The Colt. The Eagle. May they rest in pieces, and may they one day be restored to new life in future antique car shows and museums.
But eventually, and maybe sooner than you think, every fossil-fueled car will be known as The Dinosaur.
I also note that you Earthlings like to name your cars after elite political and business figures: Lincolns and Fords. Scions, Imperials and Regals. The Rambler Ambassador may be dead, but the Hindustani Ambassador (not on display here) is alive and rambling around Delhi.
The crowd today is about 90%+ Euro-American, 90% male, and skewing older. Most of the few attending women seem to be with their husbands. One guy has a T-shirt that reads “Great story, babe. Now go make me a sandwich.” Is the American car culture a traditional guy culture or whut?
Back on my native Zork, past, present and future are compressed into a single timepoint. I find a similar phenomenon here at your auto show. I find cars from the past (in the antique section), from the present (the rest of the show), and from hypothetical futures, all coexisting in the same contiguous space, in this year you Earthlings charmingly call “2014.”
But every car here is, in a certain sense, a “car of the future.” This 1928 Buick Speedster with a rear-mounted beer barrel gas tank, for example, was a “car of the future” in 1900.
beer barrel Buick
These 2014 models were the “cars of the future” as Earthlings imagined them in the late 1900s.
past "cars of the future"
And here's a screen image of a 2014-era designer’s idea of a “car of the future,” being sketched live and in real time by the artist, sitting behind the screen. That’s his hand in the video, upper right.
up-side-down car of our present "future"
The true cars of the future, I already know (because, as a Zorkian, I know your Earth’s future history) are small hybrid-fueled (e.g., solar-electric) and all-electric cars, which are barely featured in this vast exhibition of late-primitive carbon machines. I wish for your sake that you Earthlings had figured this out sooner. I also wish you had figured out Customized Mass Transit (CMT), but that's a story for another day.
Here’s an electric Nissan Leaf getting an electron fill-up from a convenient power stick (as you’ll come to call them). These will be as common as parking meters are now, but far more widely distributed. You'll wonder why you had to drive so far to find a gas station, and why the stations had to be so big.
fuel station of the future
This Leaf (and the Chevy Volt, and the 'smart fortwo electric') are the closest I can find in this show to the actual cars of the future. Most e-cars will be powered by electricity generated from renewable, battery-stored solar energy and thorium, made possible by dramatic advances in photovoltaics, battery storage, and thorium energy.
When the carbon economy falls, it’s going to fall hard, and Houston with it. But you don’t know that yet.
The end of the carbon age is coming sooner than you expect. Everything happens faster than expected now, including climate change and innovations in sustainable energy technology.
But that's still a dwindling few tomorrows away. Today I'm here to enjoy Houston Auto Show 2014. It's fascinating. It’s like visiting a future antique car show. Or a dinosaur museum.
Danagram
;] misremembering the future since 2011
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