Simplify, simplify

One true blessing Saipan offers is: Clean air. Those of us who moved from smoggy locales–Los Angeles would sure qualify–really appreciate air we can breathe but not see.

As refugees from urban hell well know, air pollution is serious business. It’s not hard to understand, then, why “eco-friendly” automobiles are attracting interest. Honda has introduced one such car to the U.S. market (so has Toyota). I’d like to be the first to predict its utter failure in the U.S. marketplace.

Honda’s “Insight,” which carries a price tag of nineteen thou, is a “hybrid,” using an electric motor in addition to the usual infernal (er…”internal”) combustion engine. Somehow, the car in cleverly engineered to use a combination of electric power and piston power to get a low-polluting vehicle that sips just a gallon of gas to scoot 70 miles.

Which is quite exciting, unless you consider that cars are complicated and costly to maintain and repair, modern cars are doubly so, and now they’ve made one that is, from the looks of things, as complicated as possible.

It might look good on the showroom floor, it might look impressive on the design board, but who amongst us can deal with a car that’s so complicated it will take an MIT educated engineer to change the transmission fluid?

Of course, Americans as a breed have lost much of their mechanical aptitude. When I was a teenager, a guy who couldn’t do a tune up and perform basic repairs was regarded as a fruit cake. Now, what with just about everyone relegated to cubicle clone status, I’ll bet a lot of guys don’t even know how to open the hood, and if they knew, they wouldn’t try, lest they risk breaking a nail.

To these folks, there’s no concept of repairability. They’ve never been awake at 3:00 a.m. reading a Chilton’s manual by the dimming orb of a Mag-Lite, hands covered in grease, knuckles scraped raw, trying to install a timing belt in some confounded tight space that only an elf can reach.

Initially, then, we can expect no KISS (“Keep it Simple, Stupid”) backlash against the hybrid Wondercars. Eventually, though, repairs will have to be made. There’s no way around it: complicated cars will have nightmarish repair bills, and the market will heed the fact.

I like complicated people and I like simple devices. Unfortunately, the world seems dominated by a confederacy of simpletons worshiping complexity.

Leave me out of it. Seventy miles a gallon might look good at first, but I want no part of it.

In the year 2010, after these cars have logged a decade on the road, we’ll be able to have some faith in them, if faith is, indeed, justified.

Until then, though, I suspect it will take a Big Government Program to make these cars viable in the U.S. market. Without such coercion, it’s hard to imagine much demand for the Wondercars.

I’m all for clean air, and my hat is off to the automotive engineers working towards this goal. But I also heed the advice of Henry David Thoreau: “Simplify, simplify.” The Wondercars are not revolutionary, they are simply a tangled evolution that misses the big picture. I doubt you’ll ever see many of them on our roads.