Drive (34 page)

This constant search for the new means that designers must pull off a tricky balancing act. “The challenge for any brand of any kind of product is to keep it meaningful and relevant and not lose the brand's visual connection with the customer,” he argued, while admitting that marketing departments and management are often only too happy to agree to radical change because they're tired of the same old thing. “The idea is you've go to do something different and keep the essence of the visual cues of that brand. When you can do both, that's when you've really accomplished something.”

Cherry is particularly proud of rejuvenating the Cadillac brand with the introduction of the CTS in 2003. At the height of their popularity, Caddies were bold statements of luxury, but the definition of luxury had changed since the 1950s and the 1960s. Believing that people around the world respect America's technology, he wanted a design theme that would communicate the luxury of the advanced technology in the vehicle. As they concentrated on this goal, he and his team looked at a lot of pictures of different types of beauty. They compared a photo of a stealth fighter with one of a Learjet, for example, and a shot of a watch with a lot of dials with one of a timepiece that was an elegant piece of jewellery. He also wanted to recapture some of the brand's distinctive visual cues—such as the vertical lights—that had been lost over the years in the frenzy to come up with new looks. All Cadillac models now have vertical headlights and
taillights and the characteristic Caddy grille. “I think we did a terrific job,” he said almost matter-of-factly. “It was a significant move for Cadillac, but it still went back to the basic values and expressed the equity that was in the brand.”

Cherry believes bold is the way to go when it comes to car design, even if it means that not everyone will like the result. “Things that appeal to too many people don't have as much impact,” he said. And, after all, not everyone wants a Cadillac. (I have to admit that though I've always thought of Caddies as glorified land yachts, I test-drove a CTS and fell in love with it.) No matter what the product is, Cherry said, “If you have your brand identity and it's strong enough, and you're revitalizing it consistently, you don't have to follow design trends. Everybody else does. And so you're never out of date, because it's your look.”

AN HOUR AFTER BEING IN
—or near—the exalted presence of Carroll Shelby, I witnessed a very different scene at the Phoenix Motorcars event. Ed Begley, Jr., the tall, thin, blond actor who is one of Hollywood's most dedicated environmentalists, had come to SEMA to speak on behalf of the Ontario, California–based company. But the audio equipment hadn't arrived, and twenty-five or so media types were growing impatient. A woman who was with a TV crew went up to Begley, introduced herself and pointed out that the lining of his light grey suit jacket had ripped and was hanging below the hem. He thanked her and then asked another camera crew for some tape. Meanwhile, behind me, someone walked by, saw Begley and said, “Who is that guy? I recognize him.”

Eventually, rather than watch the reporters move on to another press conference, the company asked everyone to move in closer and Begley spoke without the aid of a microphone. Pitching the Sport Utility Truck, a battery-electric fleet vehicle with a top speed of ninety-five miles an hour and a range of over one hundred miles per charge, Begley argued that we should all use the appropriate technology for our task. If he's driving around LA, he'll take
his electric Toyota RAV4, but for longer distances, he'll ride in a hybrid Toyota Prius: “You don't need a sledgehammer to put in a carpet tack.” Begley, who had a Mustang when he was eighteen, has been driving electric cars since 1970 (they've come a long way since then, he pointed out) and cited three reasons why the technology makes sense today: it cuts pollution, reduces America's dependence on oil from the Middle East and saves money. “It's not just about the environment, it's about the economy,” he said. “I came here in a hybrid car that got a real-world fifty-one miles per gallon. It cost me twelve dollars to get from Studio City, California, to Las Vegas. So forget the environment—it's good for my pocketbook.”

Green was a prominent theme at the show: Save the World Air, a North Hollywood, California–based company, held a well-attended press conference, though the passionate, articulate and attractive Erin Brockovich (the real one, not Julia Roberts who played her in the 2000 biopic) may have been a bigger draw than the technology, which remains unproven. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has already dismissed similar inventions, the company claimed that by using a magnetic field to reduce the viscosity of fuel, its EcoCharger products would reduce emissions, dramatically improve fuel economy and enhance engine performance. Whoever comes up with an effective and affordable way to make cars less environmentally damaging stands to receive untold riches. But the competition comes from around the globe. Despite the all-American theme of the show, it was impossible to overlook the increasing internationalization of the auto industry, which was evident at the booths and in the badges I saw on people—everywhere from Scandinavia to Israel to China.

Other trends at the show included donks, rat rods and drifting. Inspired by hip-hop, donks are custom vehicles featuring touches such as oversized rims, expensive, overpowering audio and home entertainment systems and colourful paint jobs—and even fur interiors and rhinestone exteriors. Rat rods represent the opposite
approach to car culture: they are inexpensive do-it-yourself hot rods usually assembled from parts from different cars and finished with crude or incomplete paint jobs. “It's the creativity of the young person building the rat rod that gives the vehicle its character,” said Cherry, who sees them as proof that the passion for cars is as strong as ever, even among young people. “There's no formula. They weld all sorts of pieces and bits of cars you've never even dreamed of to create these rat rods that are just phenomenal.”

Finally, drifting might be best described as synchronized skid ballet. First popularized in Japan, it's the art of controlling a car while it slides sideways. I watched a demonstration outside at the
Motor Trend
Proving Ground. Three hot-dogging drivers in souped-up, late-model U.S. sports cars—a Viper, a Mustang and a Solstice—zoomed and pirouetted around the parking lot to much cheering, hooting and whistling from the large crowd. The cacophony of revving engines and squealing tires was accompanied by smoke and the smell of burning tires. Soon, my skin was covered in a fine spray of tire dust. Down at one end, a bunch of fans were doing the “we're not worthy” bow. Some American cars are as cool as ever.

A hankering for even more horsepower dominated the trade show, in spite of all the companies hawking green technology, and that made me worry that our fanatical relationship to the automobile will evolve into something healthier even more slowly than I had feared.

16
San Francisco
Man versus the

Internal Combustion Engine

MY NEARLY TWO WEEKS
of travelling solo ended on Thursday night, when my agent David Johnston flew into town. He may not be the famed Samoan lawyer of Hunter S. Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, and I'm no gonzo journalist, but we finally left the blackjack table at 4:30 in the morning. A contractor from Red Deer, Alberta, named Garth sat beside me and acted as my consigliere, so I managed to make back all the money I'd thrown away at the roulette table and lost betting on my beloved Boston Bruins at the sports book. We weren't feeling exactly chipper the next day, and got a late start after a restorative breakfast. But I was happy to see Sin City, and all that car porn, in my rear-view mirror—and not just because we were driving into some dramatic scenery.

Although I'd read sensible advice to buy gas before entering Death Valley, I didn't heed it and ended up paying $2.95 a gallon for gas, the most I paid anywhere in the United States (the lowest was $1.99 a gallon in suburban St. Louis). Gas prices had settled back from the heights they'd hit during the summer of 2006 (in August, the average retail price of gas in the country was over $3 a gallon and I talked to people who'd paid as much as $5 in some places). Several folks I'd met along the way were convinced the lower prices were little more than a government plot in the run-up to the mid-term elections and that everyone would be paying more after November 7. And yet none of these cynics suggested they'd reduce their driving if the prices did start climbing again. This attitude reminded me of the old joke
concerning Canadians and the weather: everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.

Except that drivers
can
do something. And a few are—even if they aren't driving less, more and more people are buying hybrids such as the Toyota Prius. I hadn't seen too many on my trip until I'd reached Denver, but I knew the Prius was particularly popular in San Francisco, where David and I were headed.

Deserved or not, San Franciscans are saddled with a reputation not just for their wicked liberalism but also for their smugness. In a famous episode of
South Park
called “Smug Alert!” Stan writes a song called “Hey, People, You've Gotta Drive Hybrids Already” that convinces all the drivers in town to switch to the Toyonda Pious. They soon feel so virtuous about how much they're doing to save the planet that a menacing dark mass of toxic gas called “smug” forms over South Park. Soon the town's smug problem is second only to San Francisco's. Worse, as the two smug masses begin to merge, a “perfect storm of self-satisfaction” threatens to destroy both places. San Francisco completely disappears “up its own ass,” but the people of South Park destroy their hybrids and switch back to their SUVs. They know a better solution would be to keep the hybrids and stop being so smug about it, but admit, “It's simply too much to ask.”

Gas-electric hybrids such as the Prius may not represent the future of the automobile, but they prove there's a market for another approach. And despite
South Park
's savage satire about environmental self-righteousness, at least California—led by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who drives Hummers—is actually standing up to the car companies (something the politicians in Michigan or any of the other states that woo auto manufacturers with grants, tax holidays and infrastructure improvements would never have the guts to try). California plans to impose more stringent guidelines to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than the federal government's Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE)
standards, and to do it sooner. States have a right to set their own standards, but need to get a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency. (Late in 2007, the EPA denied the waiver request, and the state is now suing.) The prospect of tougher rules has Detroit worried. It's not so much that automakers don't want to make cleaner cars, if that's what their customers want—GM even created a hydrogen Hummer prototype that Schwarzenegger uses—but they want to do it on their own timetable, not one set by California, which is the biggest auto market in the country and an influential trendsetter.

The search for alternative fuels to power our cars is far from just another left-coast fad. Automakers have trimmed tailpipe emissions that contribute to smog and now like to boast that burning a cord of wood in a fireplace produces more particulate than driving a new, properly tuned SUV around the world 3.7 times. But they haven't eliminated emissions altogether, and the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases that cause climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels. As human-generated global warming increasingly appears to be a real threat rather than a wild theory spread by ecological Chicken Littles, even some politicians agree that something must be done. In addition, while only a small portion of the country's oil comes from the Middle East, many Americans are tired of getting tangled in conflicts over there because of oil. And the prices—which are unlikely to drop below seventy dollars a barrel in the foreseeable future, and threaten to stay well above that level, especially with soaring demand from China and India—provide another incentive to kick the oil habit. But while possible alternatives abound, each of the technologies comes with its own trade-offs.

Most engines can handle up to 10 percent ethanol in gas, and some new cars can operate on E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. In the United States, ethanol is most often made from corn, which is great for American farmers and one reason politicians are so gung-ho about it. But growing corn sucks
up both lavish government subsidies and so much oil that some critics argue that the amount of fossil fuels required to produce ethanol—to make the fertilizers and pesticides, harvest the corn, transport it and then distill it—actually exceeds the amount it replaces. Even a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed that ethanol yields only 34 percent more energy than it takes to create, so it hardly seems worth the effort. Biodiesel, usually made from soybean oil, creates the same problems. So-called “second generation” biofuels made from non-food crops may offer a better energy balance but are still probably not a viable long-term solution, especially because devoting arable land to fuel crops is already pushing up food prices. There has to be a better way.

BEFORE LEAVING LAS VEGAS,
I visited the Center for Energy Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A yellow shack sat under solar energy equipment, and atop the building was a sign that proclaimed “Net Energy Produced” above a digital readout showing the rising total. I found Julian Gardner and Ron Fifield— who were developing a way to use hydrogen in existing vehicles— working on an ATV. In a fuel cell car, no combustion takes place, only a chemical reaction that produces power to run the electric motor and a small amount of heat and water. Gardner and Fifield's system uses hydrogen in the combustion process, and they hoped to reduce the drop-off in horsepower by injecting the hydrogen straight into the cylinder, so instead of the air and the fuel mixing during the intake stroke, it mixes after the intake valve is closed. They'd spent less than two hundred dollars on the parts needed to retrofit the ATV.