Work by Ron Cobb
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As someone who has a big guilty pleasure for sports/performance cars and racing in general, this comic actually explains really well how I’m able to reconcile that with my dislike of car-centric infrastructure and wishing for better public transportation: without other means for getting around cities for people who don’t care much about cars (i.e. most people), everyone will be forced to use cars for basic transport, meaning really clogged highways and traffic jams that directly affect you and your fancy sports car’s enjoyment.
Conversely, if infrastructure was more accommodating for bikes, trains and buses to make them more viable, most people would use them, leaving the streets and highways freer for you to have fun driving your sports car the way it was meant to, instead of being stuck in traffic jams most of the time.
I just wish most people who are into cars realized this, instead of raving about how “they want to take away our cars!” and fellating Andrew Tate and other shitheads.
Why aren’t sport cars rented instead of sold? Only place you can really use them is the race track.
Lots of racetracks sell packages like this, pay $$ to take out a certain car or groups of cars. But for lots of people it’s just as much about the tuning/improving of their own car as it is about the driving.
Ok, good point.
Au contraire, my Fuck Cars fellow. A sports car’s agile handling and peppy acceleration are enjoyable even at street legal speeds. They are of course most enjoyable when driven nearer to the limits at a track, but most stock “sports cars” require some modifications to be reliably driven under such intense conditions.
think, for a moment, about the world you’re leaving to the future.
is it really worth peppy acceleration when you KNOW that is wasteful and literally costing your children? Because that’s who’s gonna pay that bill. Not you or me. Our kids and grandkids.
cars for fun made sense before we understood the actual costs.
these days it just seems gross, you got yours, fuck everyone else.
I’m happy to spend my carbon budget on an occasional Sunday cruise with the top down on a sunny afternoon, rather than overseas holidays, excessive consumption, etc. I don’t commute by car, I ride my bike as much as possible, and I advocate for improved public transit infrastructure in my community, which all have a far greater impact than my ~460 kg/year of CO2 from my joyrides.
Isn’t the more significant problem that the 98% of motorists who don’t give a rat’s ass about the driving experience, are effectively forced to drive when they could be taking alternative transport, if the infrastructure supported it?
Please, for the love of God, quadruple the carbon tax and invest it all in public transit, so that cars are treated like the luxury they should be.
Isn’t the more significant problem that the 98% of motorists who don’t give a rat’s ass about the driving experience, are effectively forced to drive when they could be taking alternative transport, if the infrastructure supported it?
I’d say they’re equally problematic - but at least their use case is part of their employment, and not part of their entirely optional entertainment.
certainly agree with the last.
least their use case is part of their employment, and not part of their entirely optional entertainment.
And if they’re driving to an entertainment event, like say a concert, a vacation, or a park, is that any better than me going for a drive for the sake of going for a pleasure cruise of equal distance? Keep in mind that my sports car is no gas guzzler. It gets the same fuel economy as an average, mid-sized sedan, and better than an average SUV or truck which dominate our roads.
If you’re the type that buys their car with the leisure in mind, I’m gonna assume you’re not cost constrained and should be doing more to help the env anyway.
hypotheticals are irrelevant so you do you, have a good life, and when you wake up to the damage you’re doing / have done, do your best to improve things.
You can do both!
Buy and rent?
No, seriously. Guzzle more gas, prone to dangerous driving. Thus my idea to only rent them at race tracks.
You have both options.
One of the big draws to things like muscle/sports cars is customization, and upgrading. You can’t do that with a rental, so one of the biggest portions of that market will be left out.
Alternative opinion:
Car companies should stop making normal cars and instead only make hardcore vehicles. I’m talking race cars that are challenging and uncomfortable to drive.
manual only, aggressive clutches, loud gears, stiff suspension, non-adjustable seat, no heat, no ac, no radio, etc.Then while they’re making this change we expand the shit out of mass transport and infrastructure!
I can assure you that nobody wants to daily drive my race car. lol
I want all of those things. I can assure you, I want to drive a V8 loud as fuck, manual thick clutched, wide tired, non AC, non radio, rear wheel drive, fucking street menace of a vehicle.
But I also want an absolute rehaul of our infrastructure to include high speed rail for the entire country, and comprehensive pricing that is subsidized by the government with my tax money and provided for free if I need it.
I want all of those things. I can assure you, I want to drive a V8 loud as fuck, manual thick clutched, wide tired, non AC, non radio, rear wheel drive, fucking street menace of a vehicle.
I hope you understand that I’m perfectly okay with this and if you posted this to be ironic or snarky… You just made my dick hard and that’s about it.
I hope you understand that I’m perfectly okay with this
Thanks, cap, I noticed.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Yes and you and i are the 0.1% lol
… Me too but make it electric to blow the doors off Maseratis from the lights.
You don’t take responsibility nor pay for the externalities
What? I daily drive a 45mpg Honda fit. It’s the size of a fucking golf cart. But I also tow and have 5 people in my family. I also am in a very high tax bracket. So …you’re wrong?
No
In your ideal scenario, what am I to do? I drive 112 miles a day to commute. And my family needs a tow vehicle, I have 3 kids and a wife. I own a 7 passenger tow machine that often has a stroller occupying the 2 extra seats plus kid extras. I’ve reached the upper middle class tax bracket. I want a rail or bus system to take me to and from work. I want the choice to drive a 12mpg big ass fuck all shitty truck. But I want others to have the choice to take a 0 emissions train to their designated station with 0 emissions golf carts to take them to their jobs. I want the future. A utopia if you will. But I won’t force that. That’s unamerican. Americans need a choice.
Why are you taking it personally? The problem is that the price paid at the pump doesn’t reflect the true cost.
I’m not taking it personal in a negative way. I’m personally taking time to try to talk to you though.
One of us!
As someone whose only car is a Honda S2000… yeah kinda.
Do honda s2000s get that bad of gas milage? They’re pretty small, lightweight cars
The engine is pretty high strung so you’re lucky to get 20-24 mpg. If you drive it hard (and it wants to be driven hard) it’s going to be less. That’s still probably better than the kind of huge muscle car in the picture, though.
The other thing is it’s just not a pleasant car to drive in traffic. It’s a manual transmission car (only ever made in manual) and it’s really easy to stall, among other things, so it’s not fun to drive through rush hour.
Ahh, gotcha. Thats a shame, my dream car is a miata which I’ve always wanted to daily drive, and I tend to think of the s2000 similarly since they’re a lot alike in many respects
Miatas are pretty similar, but modern ones have some nice advantages! It’s rated for 25/35 mpg, for example, and unlike a lot of car makers Mazda’s fuel economy numbers are pretty realistic. A Miata isn’t going to be as painful to drive in traffic, either. Not unless you modify it or something.
My dream car is an NA, so a bit less practical lol, but I still desperately want one
Also the clutch doesn’t require much force to engage, and 1st gear seems pretty forgiving, at least on the NDs. I can’t say I enjoy driving in traffic, but it’s not too bad
It’s a shame the MR2 isn’t made anymore.
The groceries in the passenger seat are a nice touch, because of course there’s gonna be no trunk space.
Instead of a macho man forging their destiny, it is a woman, given that it is the 70s, likely a housewife, coming home from grocery shopping.
How do you know she’s not a macho man forging his destiny as a housewife?
Because it is the 70s, and I am going with the common themes of the time
And doing groceries or work-related is why most people drive.
How I felt last week in my busted up 350k miles shitbox when there was a Lamborghini and Ferrari beside me crawling through traffic. Even once we were out of gridlock their average speed was probably the exact same as mine. My car costs probably 500 dollars and there’s cost literally a 1000 times more than that. Made me feel good. Also made me feel like ramming them just because
As it turns out, road speed is limited by laws, safety and traffic, not the HP of your car engine.
Which perhaps makes the purchase more justifiable in Germany when you live within reach of the Autobahn…
I love the groceries in the front seat because there’s no room anywhere else.
Even though some sort of trunk or storage could totally fit without increasing the vehicle volume.
That’s what I tell people. The reality of driving sucks. You might be in love with your fantasy of a 500 HP beast, but
meanwhile on an open mountain road on a Sunday afternoon
“Woooooo!!!”
Where you’re driving is as important as what. You’d love to drive a Civic Type R.
In a hospital? Maybe not.
Nah, FL5 Type 5 has hill assist, rev match, anti stall, and brake lock. With really comfy bucket seats. At speed you got Honda’s bitchin adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist. It’s as comfortable as a manual car can be for commuting and traffic. 10/10 would recommend as daily driver.
The fact that it needs to be open means 99% of people can’t be there, which includes 98% of 500 HP car owners.
99% of people aren’t there, it’s a sunny afternoon on a mountain road.
You’re missing the point. 98% of drivers drive cars they don’t need and never experience fully. If driving on an open road on a sunny Sunday afternoon was the average motivation for such a car they’d all be stuck in traffic.
It’s the same argument behind pickups, really.
1969 and it is still relevant.
Murica
The slowest common denominator decides how much man you are heh
lol front car is Trauma B
I’ve always wanted to do this in video form - have a montage of heroic car ads that just crossfade together with tons of shots of those gas guzzlers sitting at red lights and in traffic.
Please do, curious to see what it’d result in.
This is why people have a commuting car and a track car. Your track car is often not your commuting car
Easy peasy, let’s simply all own a commuting car and a race car. /s
Why not?
Most people cannot afford it and we’d have to bulldoze tons of space to accommodate the parking.
However for those who enjoy racing as a hobby, I 100% agree that it’s best to go to a track instead of endangering those around you and causing noise pollution.
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Y’all pretend roads outside the city and weekends don’t exist. My commute is a joy.
Most people live in a city, and are therefore subject to traffic like this.
Wrong. Individually Urban neighborhoods were about 100M. See what you have done is combined urban and suburban populations like it’s a political map. But the suburban population of the US is 175M with rural adding 46M.
So no, most of the US, does not experience this nor do they live in a city. They probably live near a city.
Suburbs are a part of a city.
Look even expanding your scope here, only 40% of them live in early suburbs vs late and exurb. And only the early suburbs from the top 6 metropolis. The vast majority of small metropolis early suburbs look nothing like this.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environment/us-cities-factsheet
It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-majority-of-people-in-the-world-now-live-in-cities
cities with more than 50,000 people have become the most popular living areas worldwide, as shown in the chart.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/270860/urbanization-by-continent/
North America as well as Latin America and the Caribbean were the regions with the highest level of urbanization, with over four fifths of the population residing in urban areas.
Looking at counties instead of actual cities is your problem.
Exactly, the comic is showing an urban driver’s problem. Fortunately the USA is massive and we have many more uncrowded roads across its vast and beautiful landscape that drivers can travel freely upon. Traffic jams are rare in my area, but occasionally I visit Atlanta or some similarly large city and marvel at how much it sucks to drive in their traffic.
True freedom includes having room to breathe and roam. For those who haven’t experienced it, my condolences.
Something tells me you drink and drive
Not at all. They are assholes.
You’ve invented such an angry fact about me 😑.
