Got myself riled up a bit during my commute home that featured a detour for an errand. Please note that a lot of these opinions are exaggerated.You know all those car commercials that have the cars bouncing around town, driving winding roads in the countryside, and just generally trying to make their car look fun?
I don't get it. Driving is not fun. Driving is a chore. To summarize my attitude to driving, it's along the lines of "extreme laundry day." Note that I'm going by a quote I heard long ago from some extreme sports athlete commenting about the silly overuse of "extreme" in marketing: "If you can't die while doing it, it's not extreme."
Driving is a series of life-and-death decisions and it just wears on me. Keep the flying, talking cars. Just give me one that'll safely drive itself. While you're working on that, how about at least giving me some stuff that'll help save me from making some stressful decisions.
Back to the commercials: A lot of these commercials out there convince me that the marketers making them have only learned about driving from videogames and watching others do it from a window seat on the bus. I don't need my extreme laundry day to be more extreme. The most reasonable commercials I've seen are those that emphasize safety, comfort, gas mileage, and economy. If you're doing an extreme chore every day, you might as well be a little less extreme, more comfortable, and generally have less impact on the environment and your wallet.
8 comments:
Extreme Laundry
They do have cars that safely drive themselves. They're called buses. ;)
I am a whore for public transportation. Or I guess a John for public transportation, since I'm the some giving them money in exchange for services.
And oh what a service!
Only buses in my area are yellow and carry a lot of annoying kids.
Driving in the country is fun, imo. I take public transportation in the city, all right, but the only thing I enjoyed about living in Monterey was driving on the highway along the ocean. Well, not the only thing, but one of them.
Heck, I enjoy driving as long as it's less than about 2 hours a day. After that it wears on me.
Negative conditions drop that number, obviously. However, cruising down the highway on a cool, clear spring day with a bottle of Jones Juice in your hand is absolute bliss.
I like public transit - gives me time to read I would waste concentrating on the road.
As for television ad, I just say this: I am convinced that some spots are created during an acid trip.
And a bad one at that.
I used to find driving a lot of fun, when I was 17 and I'd just gotten my threadbare '88 Crown Victoria. That car saw a lot of speeding with the windows down and the stock stereo system cranked up.
I've since come to alternate between seeing it as a chore and time better spent doing something (how I would love to have a self-driving car, so I could read while traveling), or getting some measure of enjoyment out of it while blasting music at high volume or listening to podcasts (next best thing to reading!) I think a lot of it has to do with the price of gas, to be honest, and with the amount of driving I'm doing now. The less driving I have to do, the more I tend to enjoy it, I think.
Which is all part of why I've taken so readily to riding a bike around town. I get to where I want to go relatively quickly, I can listen to music or podcasts on the way, and I'm getting a workout, so I feel like it's time well spent.
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