With all of the recent hype over fuel prices, hybrids, and fuel sucking SUVs, I thought I would offer my nickels worth on this topic.

For those that know me, I have always had an eclectic taste in motor vehicles. My dad worked for Ford Motor Company for 50 years, so I guess I developed my addiction to all things motor driven from him. He was always coming home with cool cars and rarely had a car longer than 6 months. Back in the late 60’s through the early 70’s his homecomings frequently involved hi-performance Mustangs, Torinos, Panteras and such. How about a 1968 Shelby GT 500 convertible, red with a saddle interior, with a 428 – dual quad with a 4peed! Oh to have that car today, I could retire. In fact at one time we had matching 1966 Mustangs – one was mom’s the other was dad’s company car. My friends always thought my dad was cool because of his ability to get these cars. It was, after all, the heyday of the muscle car era.

Then came the late 70’s and 80’s! Hi-performance was out and emissions and safety became the newspeak of the day. Anything with more than a 6 cylinder engine just seemed to be wrong. Gas lines, 5 mile per hour bumpers, and Pintos were the norm. These factory hot-rods of the 60’s became boat anchors overnight and you couldn’t give them away. Gas was hovering around a dollar a gallon and if you needed more than $5.00 dollars worth and if you were an ‘even calendar day’ car needing gas on an odd calendar day… well, you stayed home or walked.

As is often the case, life tends to run in circles. Here we are some 25 years later dealing with similar fuel shortage issues. The irony here is that we can have our cake and eat it to. You want to be a tree-hugging environmentalist? Cool, go buy a Hybrid or diesel. You need 500 horsepower and still get 20 miles per gallon; you have more choice today than we did 25 years ago. Better yet the cars are cleaner (emissions wise), safer and faster than the vehicles of a quarter century ago!

As mentioned in my earlier blog, we have a 1971 Mustang Mach 1. It has been a project of some 18 years now and has been a labor of love bringing it back to its former factory condition. It is not the fastest car out there. It has no power steering, it has manual drum brakes and you cannot see out the back to save your life. A Subaru WRX could probably dance circles around it. But it has ‘the feel’ of what the muscle cars were about and that is what makes the difference. You have to really drive this car; it is not a get in and point it down the road car.

Besides the Mach 1, the Harleys, Grace’s daily driver (1998 Sable) and a weekend runner (1996 F150), my daily runner is a 2000 Beetle. When I arrived at work the other day, one of my new employees (he is 17) asked me if that was my wife’s car. I looked at him and was probably looking a bit perturbed when I replied, “no, it is mine.” He said with all seriousness, “I never saw a guy drive one of these before”. No, I didn’t pick him up and throw him across the room, but I did tell him about our “fleet’ and that this was my daily driver. When I mentioned to him that it was a diesel and that I averaged 48 miles to the gallon, he suddenly became more interested and wanted to see under the hood.

The point of all of this is that alternative fuels are not a new thing. Diesels and electric cars have been with us in some form or fashion for almost 100 years. While today’s electric cars are certainly more technically proficient than those from the late 80’s, I am not sure if they are the solution to the gas shortage issue (if, in fact there really is an issue, but that is another post for another day). Diesels were originally designed to run on vegetable oil and with a minor conversion, any of today’s diesels can run on the same. The new SMART car from Mercedes is a three cylinder 2 passenger commuter car that purportedly gets in excess of 80 miles to the gallon! Although officially unavailable in the US, they are drifting in from Canada. Grace and I saw one in Acton yesterday and it is tiny.

We have choice and that is what makes living in today’s world such a great thing. I, at times, consider myself to be stuck in the 60’s, but with the technology we have today - I wouldn’t go back for anything