re: cool car rant

[alfanut@domain.elided]

>I know I'm biased towards italian cars but there is definitely a
><revolution in auto design happening in europe - principally in Italy and
>to a certain extent in France and Germany.  Unfortunatley the U.S. is
>not seeing any of this.  Notable examples of exciting and innovative
>styling were the following:

>* Fiat Spider - ditto
>* Lancia Y10 - aggressive little hatchback
>* Fiat Multipla - bizzare people carrier
>* Smart Citycar - just plain cool.
>* Audi TT - beautiful (ok  - the U.S. gets this)

MY FAVES of the cars you pointed out...

>The above look like NOTHING available here in the US where we're
>subjected to the generic marchmallow blob consortium idiot mobile e.g.
>ford taurus/honda accord/neon thingy/bmw 3-5-7/chrysler etc.

Keith, I agree 100 percent. Sadly we (including all the AD brethren) are
the minority in this country that would consider the SMALL cars as
transport. I wrote Smart to find out if they had plans to sell cars in the
US. I received a quick and polite email response that they were
concentrating on europe but they had done market research in the US which
discouraged them from considering the jump across the pond (Bubba and Betty
Sue were too fat to fit in the thing?). What we need to lobby for is a
worldwide emission and safety standard so that we could just buy the damn
car there and bring it back as excess baggage.
It is encouraging that Smart had done market research here. That tells me
that the car (as I would guess with many of the newer euro cars) is quite
close to meeting US emissins and safety standards as designed.

Now if we are lucky a few more refineries will blow up (we had a few
problems with Nor Cal refineries recently  gas is still $1.55-$2.00/gallon)
and OPEC will tighten the screws some more...;-) OK, so gas would get
really expensive (for the US that is) but the positive is that it would
create an instant demand for small, sporty, intelligently-designed cars
(readers here realize that doesn't mean Honda). As an additional
positive...ALL SUV's would be sent to Kosovo to be used as temporary
housing for refugees. I haven't figured out how the gas crisis would curb
cell phone drivers but I'm w0rking on it.


Michael Williams
Sacramento, California US of A
69 Duetto
84 GTV-6

http://www.rcip.com/michael

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