Ah, Progress! You know those brand new gleaming strips of asphalt all along the Vashon Highway that were installed in the last couple of weeks (and snarled traffic for days)? Let me just ask you this question: Is it me, or is that new pavement way bumpier than what was there before?
I’m not trying to be cranky (I don’t have to; it comes naturally), but I am a deeply caring person … at least for my car, Gigi. And I don’t want her jarred unnecessarily.
For one thing, I just spent $3,000 having her overhauled. Her resale value is something less than $2,000.
Before you sneer, allow me to point out that this is not just any car, but a 1986 red VW Golf GTI sports car — the car dubbed “The Pocket Rocket” and “one of the 10 best cars ever made,” by respected car magazines around the world. (You know, those garish, hyperventilated car enthusiast rags that sit on the table in the waiting room when you’re having your tires changed? Those magazines. Guy magazines.)
Maybe you think this investment — let’s not call it “an idiotic expenditure of scarce family funds in a plunging economy” — is crazy. (For the record, so does everyone else, including my partner, Susan, but then she’s never driven Gigi, owing to an inability to drive a manual shift, poor benighted thing, so what does she know, really?)
I say, no! This isn’t about an aging adolescent’s obsessive passion for a small, powerful and — let’s face it — very old hunk of automotive steel.
No, of course not.
This is about the environment.
Because, you see, I am a much better environmental citizen than any of you folks who rushed out to buy your oh-so-politically correct Priuses or similar (and wussy) hybrid vehicles. That’s right. OK, so maybe you get somewhat better mileage than I do. But guess what? After 22 years and nearly 250,000 miles, Gigi still gets 28 mpg in the city and 34 on the Interstate. She probably gets even more here on the Island, if only because she’s so incredibly bored driving 25 miles per hour everywhere.
But mileage isn’t everything. Uh-uh. Not even close.
That’s because the life cycle costs of your brand new, socially responsible Prius (what kind of a name is that, anyway?) cost the Earth, so to speak, to produce.
Don’t trust me, though, trust Toyota. A couple of years ago they discovered (you could almost hear them muttering Japanese curse words) that 28 percent of all the carbon dioxide emissions created by one of their cars was created during manufacturing, before it ever rolled out of the showroom. High mileage? Big deal.
Think about it: First you have to mine the minerals from which to make aluminum, steel and plastic. Then you process them, using enormous amounts of electricity, then you fabricate the car (think of all those workers just driving to the factory), and so on. And on. Not to mention the environmental cost of dumping your last car, or the cost of dumping your new car, eventually.
Here’s the big irony: Hybrid vehicles have even higher lifetime environmental costs (experts call them “dust-to-dust” costs) than non-hybrid vehicles.
How can that be? Well, for starters (no pun intended) they have two engines. How wasteful is that? What’s more, one of them is made of batteries, and batteries are very ugly environmental risks. You know all those old cars that sit growing mold in back fields all over this Island? Think a few years hence, when they’ll be ex-hybrids, leaking toxic battery stuff into our groundwater, which, I hear, ain’t so good to begin with.
So next time you and your hybrid are struggling to get up that long hill coming out of Burton, and a small red car passes you like you’re standing still, because you nearly are, and you hear a voice yelling, “Neener-Neener!,” just remember this: I’m a better citizen than you are.
Environmentally speaking, of course.
— Will North is an author living on Vashon.
