A few weeks ago, I went to a Toyota dealership to look at their Priuses. Really, I’d rather not have to have a car at all, but I just moved to Ohio and cars are pretty much a necessity of life here. This is the land of multi-car families, where car-pooling is practically nonexistent, and most vehicles stuck in traffic during rush hour have one driver and no passengers. Hell, there was a time when my parents owned seven cars (one for each driver in the family and one extra, just for good measure).
Ohio loves its cars, and doesn’t seem to think too much about what those cars mean to the environment, the economy, and U.S. foreign policy. So, it wasn’t too surprising when the saleswoman at Toyota tried to sway me away from the Prius towards a Camry or Corolla. I tried to explain to her that I was only interested in the hybrid, when my dad interrupted in a “don’t mind her” fashion, to tell the woman I’d just moved from San Francisco. The saleswoman sighed, “Oh… you’re one of those ‘green’ people.”
From there, the conversation strayed away from interest rates and incentives. The saleswoman was astounded when it dawned on her that I didn’t have a car in San Francisco and that this would be the first car I’d ever owned. She wanted to know how I got around without a car, did I just take taxis everywhere? Imagine her surprise when I told her I walked as much as possible and took public transportation. She laughed and said, “Yeah, we sure are spoiled around here. I tell you, I just hate to walk. When I first started working here, you should have heard me when they showed me how far away the employee parking lot is from the office. I was like, ‘You expect me to walk all that way?!’” At that point, I realized she and I were never going to understand each other and she was not going to help me get a Prius. My dad, a man who sees cars as necessary tools and doesn’t see owning a car as a complex issue, was not at all pleased at my disinterest in any other car and grudgingly took me home. Thus ended my first and only car-shopping experience.
One thing I didn’t know before visiting the dealership was that every Prius in America is made in Japan. I’d never even thought about that, but it totally pissed me off. The best bet we have for an environmentally responsible car is shipped here from across the Pacific, loaded on trains or car-carriers at Los Angeles or Oakland, and then trucked all the way across the country? How is that possible? I’d be interested to see how close the emissions from the ship’s oil and the truck’s diesel come to negating the benefits of the bio-plastic and hybrid engine of the Prius.
Most Americans don’t have much of a choice when it comes to modes of transportation. Sprawl has eliminated the option of walking to work, school, and shopping. Public transportation is spotty and unreliable in all but major cities. Moving to a metropolis is out of the equation for most people, and they are left no choice but to drive. So why aren’t there better choices for what we can drive? It’s sad that the best we can do are hybrid vehicles that still rely at least partially on fossil fuels. As a consumer, it’s extremely frustrating to be at the mercy of the auto manufacturers and feel forced to give up on values I feel very strongly about, just so I can get around.
But really, the auto industry isn’t solely to blame. The situation this country is in right now is a result of a corrupt political machine which values the interests of lobbyists over all other concerns, a national epidemic of abysmal city planning, and, most importantly, a populace disconnected from their community and the world at large. Incubated in a world of plastic and glass, Americans today live in literal and metaphorical bubbles, traveling between the manufactured realities of their cookie-cutter suburb to their cube-and-fluorescent-light cage to their local big box superstore where they can buy prepackaged meat and shrink-wrapped vegetables and anonymous clothing. We know more about the contestants on American Idol than we do our own Supreme Court. We breathe filtered air for the majority of our day and only see the real world through the glass of our windshields.
Remind me again why I was going to buy a car?
