"sport truck" my ass

so i was sitting here eating dinner and laughing at things on the internet, gearing up to wander around pullman for 67 hours again tonight, alone and cold and in the dark, maybe going to the bike path and trying to figure out how the bridge supports on that weird bridge over the river work, and i needed something to do while my computer burns the last few discs of wilco's 5-night riviera party from february.

fortunately, i was emailed this article.

first of all, i have to say that, solely from an aesthetic point of view, the sport truck is grotesque. search GIS for "pontiac g8 sport truck" to see what i mean. it's the one that looks like the mutated offspring of a giant banana and the black guy robot from transformers. this only reinforced the point that the article already made me want to make.

i just cannot understand why pontiac and a few other car companies (among them buick and cadillac, as cited in the article) continue to exist in the early 1990s. these car companies, as near as i can tell, only still exist thanks to misguided rich-ass american brand loyalty and inertia (which are basically the same thing). who the space-fuck is going to buy a 402 hp, 6.2-liter engine-based car? only 358,000 people apparently. and pontiac seems shocked. they attribute it to the fact that pontiac has failed to live up to its 1960s image, thus resulting in pontiac owners feeling they've been lied to. maybe, instead, they could attribute it to the fact that IT'S NOT 1960 ANYMORE! it's like people who insist they should have the right to have a laser guided missle system in their house because the constitution, written 300 years ago when everybody owned a rifle and you learned how to use one before you were allowed to kiss a girl, says we have the right to defend ourselves. hey pontiac: maybe you shouldn't be so surprised at the new CAFE standards. the rest of us have seen this coming for at least a decade. if you hadn't been obsessed with maintaining your car-as-phallus-extension business model you might have caught a wiff of the wind (of chaaaaaaaaange...)

i understand, in a warped capitalist way, the desire to create something that only the top 10 percent of the population (finance-wise) can afford. selling 10 $20,000 cars is the same as selling one $200,000 car. the thing is, though, that people with large disposable income are:
1) fickle
2) generally concerned with appearance, and maintaining said appearance, hence the need to buy a $200,000 car in the first place

obviously my example is a little extreme for pontiac's sake, but still. the type of people who are, in this day of hybrid cars and mpg standards and alternative fuel sources, going to buy a car that has a v8 and goes 0 to 300 in four tenths of a second are generally just going to care about how cool that car makes them feel. so if you don't maintain the image of being cool, you're done for. you don't have anything to fall back on like having a reliable car, a cheap car, an efficient car... you get the idea. you become pontiac, buick, cadillac, hummer. those other three brands aren't doing bad for now because they're a little higher up the income chain and people still associate them with badassedness. but once gas hits 5 dollars a gallon, it'll be interesting to see how badly people want to be able to fill up two parking spots everytime they go to wal-mart.

i get why the status quo is good if you're rich. if it ain't broke for you, it's not in your best interest to fix it. but it just annoys me how so many of these people who (supposedly) got rich in the first place by being cutting-edge, or innovative, etc. consistently clam up in the face of the one thing that's certain in the world: change.

in the type of energy crisis that we're entering (crisis being relative because we still won't be on par with most of the civilized world as far as gas prices go until we get up to a lot more dollars a gallon), it's completely obvious that these new standards, expectations, and concerns need to be taken into account and that people should stop being surprised when their new design for a 15 mpg road rocket for 2009 gets scrapped because, well, the earth is melting.

it reminds me (as most things inducing anger do) of the RIAA, who regularly resorts to byzantine and morally questionable tactics to bust individual citizens for infringing on their laws concerning a business model that became outdated the minute the internet became a household word, instead of finding a way to use the new system to their advantage. it just blows my mind.

/rant
//well, i'm off.