Futility Vehicle

[depakid]

This is a story of selfishness and greed, of self-centeredness, envy and the ignorant folly of a person too short-sighted to realize she should count herself lucky because her college education didn’t have to be paid for with the milk of a goat.

The tale could be called: I Can No Longer Afford to Drive My Car.

The vehicle in question is a Land Rover. (2004 Land Rover. Vinyl interior. 33,000 miles. No sun roof. If you’re interested.)

It is a big black behemoth that stands more than six feet tall, weighs 6,724 pounds and gets, according to E.P.A. calculations, 11 miles to the gallon in the city, assuming you don’t go uphill, stop at stop signs or run the air conditioning.

If you do any of these things, the gas mileage, according to my calculations, falls by about half.

“You always exaggerate,” my husband Max always complains.

I don’t think I do.

I haven’t actually made a formal study of the Land Rover’s gas mileage. I’ve simply stopped driving the car to anywhere other than our metro stop (1.5 miles; about a quarter tank of gas) or the supermarket (.88 miles, maybe an eighth of a tank of gas) or the gas station. Last Sunday, needing to transport a camp trunk, we drove it to Virginia, which was costly (96 miles, perhaps 1,800 tanks of gas), but highly worthwhile, because the driveway leading up to the camp’s welcome area was gravelly and steep.

“She loves this terrain,” Max said, patting the dashboard.

Why on earth did we buy a car like this?

Well, a lot of people once did. In fact, until late 2004, a lot of people went out of their way to buy precisely these monsters because -– if you can believe it -– the government actually offered a tax break for buying a car that weighed over 6,000 pounds if you were self-employed and needed it to transport heavy work machinery. Like farm equipment. Or a laptop.

But that’s not why we bought ours.

We bought our Land Rover because our friends had one. They were fun, attractive, athletic kinds of people, and it seemed to us that that they had a fun, attractive, athletic kind of a car. A swashbuckling kind of a car. With its extra-high roof rack, its khaki-colored interior, its front end that looked like the face of a panther, their Land Rover looked like it could take you away from Safeway and out on safari.

More: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/futility-vehicle/