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I Hate Paying For Gas

Monday, 14 January 2008

This is the first of many posts that will include art. I'm hoping that these images will better convey my sentiments more than my words.

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I don't know much about cars, beyond basic maintainance. I think that if more average people knew how cars worked backwards and forwards, we might have more options. If people took the responsibilty of learning how to build a car from the ground up we might actually have more people and more minds working on a solution to this dependence on fossil fuels.

Car manufacturers rely on having your vehicle be a mystery to you. This is how the Geek Squad makes money as well. When you bring it in to the dealership for service, you are kept out of way of the mechanics because God forbid you watch them and learn how to fix a car yourself.

There is no one stopping you from taking your computer apart. But people have a fear of things they don't understand. This is why people pay for things they don't need.

I wish that it would be practical to build your car from parts of your own choosing. This would be like building your own custom home rather than choosing options in a tract home. You could buy your engine which ran on whatever fuel you liked. You could buy whatever body style you want. You can choose the seats with your choice of upholstery. What would be awesome would be to actually participate in the construction of your own car like on these shows on the Discovery channel where they build bikes.

I'm sure there are boutique car shops that can do this, but they too are out of the price range of regular people. The thing that we sacrifice is the warranty. What what case modder has an expectation of a warranty on a system that they build? If something goes wrong, they deal with it themselves.

You need a license to drive a car, but not operate a computer. There really ought to be licensing for people to use computers. My wife comes home with so many stories of people who are techologically illiterate, yet are responsible for other people's accounts. The frustration that she has with some of these people is the same as I have not knowing my own vehicle. But I want to learn.

One of the things that I want to do once I get out of the rat race is take some classes on auto mechanics and buy a beater car to learn on and fix up.

But until then, I wish manufacturer's would give us the option to have either a solar/battery car, a hydrogen car that ran on water/aluminum, or a biodiesel car that ran on used cooking oil. Once these options are actually available to consumers, then all of the supporting industries will fall in line.

Once we can get to the point where everyone has everything that they need, it will no longer be necessary for soldiers to kill or die in a foreign land.