<
This is my car, a 1982 Honda Civic 1300FE. A piece of history.
It’s got 188,000 miles on it. About 2,500 miles ago, they told me it wasn’t safe to drive. It still gets 42 miles per gallon. And it’s all real metal. Not plastic.
We forget the past. The auto industry would have us believe that a new, expensive hybrid engine is necessary to get this kind of mileage.
But back in 1982, we’d had eight years of oil boycotts and “shortages”, and we were tired of importing oil from the Middle East. So Detroit built more efficient cars, because that’s what people wanted. Car size shrunk, mileage went up.
Times changed, cars got bigger and mileage went down, because that’s what the consumers wanted.
Now a hybrid getting 40 miles a gallon is a cool, expensive, trendy, subsidized thing. But my car isn’t any of these things. On those rare visits to the gas station, maybe someone might learn a bit of mobile history from me.
]]>
