Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?
First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks…
Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade, but a 31 year old fire truck is sending a giant fuck you to anyone else trying to reduce their carbon emissions.
> Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?
Not at all. It’s just that in the USA, things are on a different scale, and it makes sense to have larger vehicles.
For example, a couple of years ago on eBay I bought a second-hand carrier battle group. Now, if you’re not from the USA, I can already hear you objecting that “it’s impractical” to drive a small fleet of ocean-going vessels on suburban streets, or that “it’s wasteful” to retain a staff of thousands just to make the daily commute, or that it’s “not all that great, environment-wise,” to knock over city blocks every time I make a Starbucks run. And, in your country, I’d guess you’d have a point. But here in the USA, once you factor the need to carry back all the stuff we buy at Costco, you can see how the extra capacity of a carrier battle group would actually save you trips and, in the long run, be more efficient than a smaller vehicle. So, once you think it through, it actually makes sense.
I had a similar experience buying a MiG-17 as my primary vehicle to commute to work 17 miles away. The DMV was initially not happy about my taking off and landing on quiet highways, but luckily they became more understanding after many letters. How much did you end up paying for your CVBG?
Guys, I understand wanting to maximize your load-carrying efficiency, but decommissioned naval vessels and military aircraft are not the way to do it.
For my commute, I chose rail instead – Budd Pioneer III-series rolling stock go for surprisingly little on eBay these days, and at least where I live, it's not terribly expensive to file the paperwork for a zoning easement to add a 700v third rail to a local stretch of freight rail (you can usually find qualified installers on Craigslist).
These rolling stock are single-operator capable, so the staffing costs can be quite low, and generally buying electric for a home rapid transit system is far cheaper than buying fuel for a home naval vessel or home fighter jet, especially if you can power down the transformers while you're at work.
>Guys, I understand wanting to maximize your load-carrying efficiency, but decommissioned naval vessels and military aircraft are not the way to do it.
I disagree. I understand the limitations of land-based military vehicles, but tmoertel has it right. Oceangoing vessels make for quite practical daily drivers. If you can afford it I would highly recommend a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. I take it as a point of pride and efficiency that I only need to refuel it once every two decades, though I admit that sourcing a sufficient quantity of reactor grade fissile material for two separate reactors may be a bit of a hassle for the average commuter.
However, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. The 260,000 horsepower provided by the reactors supply plenty of energy to operate an on-site synthetic biofuel manufacturing facility to provide liquid fuel for the fleet of light aircraft in case I want to go to Costco or anywhere else not equipped with large enough pier to dock the carrier, and you can get a pretty good deal on decommissioned F-14 Tomcats these days. Plus, flying over all the traffic at Mach 2 is really satisfying.
And as time passes and technology improves the operating costs continue to fall. I've joined up with a pilot project in a joint venture between Google and Cyberdyne Systems to develop a self-driving carrier, and so far they've been able to reduce the required crew complement by more than 30% in just two years. I estimate that before the end of the decade we'll have it fully automated and then every American family will be able to operate their own carrier and fleet of fighter aircraft.
If someone wrote about their experiences travelling the world, would you make a similar criticism? After all, they are flying, which causes a lot of extra carbon emissions.
Or is the fire truck particularly bad for some reason?
As a European I don't understand the american fascination with impractically fhuge cars for every day commuting.
Okay I get it, you want a big car for that roadtrip or vacation. Understandable, I do too. But for everyday stuff? My hatchback does perfectly fine around town ... hell, it does perfectly well on most vacations and long drives too.
Something occurred to me today regarding Americans and big huge stupid cars... I was watching the NASCAR earlier and there was a throwaway comment about some driver's sponsors being "local". By local they mean 60 miles away. Now to a Brit, maybe other Europeans, 60 miles feels like anything but "local". So, I get the impression that we don't understand the sort of scale of travel there is in the US. Which kinda begins to explain this fascination with big large cars with big lazy engines. These cars fit American geography and scale. I think it also explain what oil seems that bit more important to the Americans.
See, Im pretty sure that if an American came to live in the UK (maybe else where in Europe) and tried to run a big old American car here, it would take about a week before this American when off and bought a little European type car. Equally, Im pretty sure we'd ditch a small Euro type car for a big old American thing is we went to the US.
I too think American cars are a bit silly, but I think they make sense in context. I think American cars will get smaller and more efficient, but I think they will always be designed with those long distances and scales in mind.
> Now to a Brit, maybe other Europeans, 60 miles feels like anything but "local". So, I get the impression that we don't understand the sort of scale of travel there is in the US. Which kinda begins to explain this fascination with big large cars with big lazy engines. These cars fit American geography and scale. I think it also explain what oil seems that bit more important to the Americans.
I would daresay it's more cultural than geographical, or at least it's an isolated case. Distances here in Australia are even larger, yet SUVs/4WDs don't outpace the small-medium car sector in year-over-year growth.
Ahh, but in my limited experence in visiting Australia your roads are in MUCH better shape. In some parts of America road maintaince is poor and the demand for an SUV is in part a desire for better driving experence.
To give you some sense of how "local" 60 miles can be in the US, I live a more urban life style than most people in the US (although likely less than most people on this board), but I frequently drive 60 miles simply to have dinner with friends or family. We never considered that a hike, it's just a quick trip in the car.
Our 2005 Honda CRV is approaching 120,000 miles, and both myself and my fiancée telecommute.
I'm in the UK (Scotland) and I don't think twice about driving 6 hours in one day to go skiing (3 hour drive, say 6 hours skiing, 3 hour drive back) - in fact thinking about doing that tomorrow.
A colleague just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.
The idea that most people think that 100 miles is a long way is silly.
I'm in the UK (Scotland) and I don't think twice about driving 6 hours in one day to go skiing (3 hour drive, say 6 hours skiing, 3 hour drive back) - in fact thinking about doing that tomorrow.
A colleage just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.
The sense of scale is noticable even in this article. The author is parking a fire engine on his driveway. Here in Europe a driveway is one or two car lengths of gravel or paving blocks.
In the US, everyone's driveway is more like something approaching a major civil engineering undertaking, being the size of a tennis court, consuming several cubic metres of concrete, steel reinforcing, etc.
Most millionaires here in Uruguay don't have a house that large.
I can't believe how big U.S. houses are. A quick Googling shows they're much larger than the average house in my country:
Average House Size By Country
Australia - 214.6 sq m (2310 sq ft), 2.56 people per household (pph)
USA - 201.5 (2170), 2.6 pph
New Zealand - 196.2 (2112), 2.6 pph
Canada - 181 (1950), 2.5 pph
Japan - 132 (1420), this year the pph in Tokyo dropped below 2 for the first time (1.99)
UK - 76 (818), 2.1 pph
and those are averages, I'm sure median shows a different picture (small flats for Europe and urban Latin America, large houses for suburban U.S. and Australia).
The median for a flat here in Montevideo is about 60 square meters (the one I rent is 55 square meters, and most new ones are even smaller), and the median house is about 100 square meters (and forget about the humungous driveways and stuff the U.S. suburban house has).
I wonder what the stats on that are. I can only think of a hand full of US metro locations that would actually have areas that I would think of as exurbs and most of them are on the coasts (sans Chicago and maybe Dallas/Fort Worth).
Since I'm not a researcher I can really only speak to my experience around Milwaukee. Basically any town within Milwaukee County doesn't (as a rule, there are exceptions) have that kind of space. But further than that, there's quite a bit of space. Probably still not fire-engine-storage space, but at least riding-mower-recommended space.
I drive a 2012 Subaru Impreza. Before that I drove a 2001 Hyundai Accent and before that a 1997 Kia Sephia. All of those are small cars, maybe it is because I am from The Netherlands but I never considered a large car, they slurp gas like it is going out of style and I want something compact that I can park almost anywhere.
What I do like is that even with a small circle of friends it is almost guaranteed that you know someone with a large truck that can help you move large things, such as couches =).
My grandma owned a Toyota Aigo and now drives a VW Golf. Love both of those cars, but I like the station wagon like look from the Impreza.
Yes, the Impreza is a small car, I've seen people drive that in The Netherlands (although Subaru seems to be pretty rare there). Compare it to an Audi A6 wagon for example, plenty of those available.
I guess small is in the eye of the beholder, my car isn't much bigger than my grandpa's Opel Astra for example, and that is considered a small car in The Netherlands.
I know, but what called my attention is that the poster is European.
Part of my family lives in Austria, and what they consider a "small car" is more along the lines of a Volkswagen Golf, which is a little under 4 meters.
According to Wikipedia itself, the Impreza wold be a "Compact" (what North Americans consider a small car)
My 8.5 year old car has 31,000 miles on it. I haven't had a job since 2007 where I have to drive to work. My daily commute now is a 1.5 mile round trip walk. I hate traffic and don't understand other Americans who are fine with driving long distances on a daily basis.
My wife and I both have a 70-80 mi round trip commute. Between our two cars, we average about 41MPG commuting. Also, we both don't commute everyday, that said, we still manage to have put 50k miles on each of our cars in 3 years. California is not a small/compact place.
Given how little I currently commute (2x/week), I am actually considering trading in my diesel VW for an old vanagon -- to facilitate some camping trips and the like. It will mean less milage efficiency, but 2x/week commuting won't take a huge hit.
That sounds about right. I grew up in sacramento, CA and commuted about 30 miles to high school (centrally located private high school that had much better test scores than the public schools less than 5 miles away from my house.). Many of my classmates commuted just as far, too, so it's not like I was weird for doing so.
There's no complicated fascination. It is simple. People like big cars because they are spacious, feel safer, provide a higher vantage point, and a host of other reasons.
Your hatchback is perfectly fine around town, but it can't tow a boat, and most people don't like to have multiple cars.
So, what winds up happening is people buy the most car they think they will need. It's totally overkill driving to work, and plenty of people never actually tow that boat, but this is why it happens.
Europeans would do the exact same thing, I figure, if they lived in an economic climate with similar gas prices and car taxes and such. With the possible exception of people living in old cities whose roads are just too small.
> With the possible exception of people living in old cities whose roads are just too small.
It's more the rule than the exception.
European car makers have a specific car category named "City cars", big enough to host 4 to 5 people but as small as possible to be easy to park etc.
Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful. This is why he don't understand.
American cities are modern and built for cars, most big european cities have been built for walkers and horses, so now we got a tons of oneway streets and a general lack of space to park cars.
It kind of depends where you live in the US. I live in a rural PA town where they have built highways over dirt roads and the main state route into town is a two lane country street that carries 18 wheelers every hour of the day and has a never ending backup.
Parking on main street, for example, is nigh impossible. Parts of it aren't wide enough for many cars to go past one another while the streetside parking is in use (and it always is, the town has no parking since... who needed parking in 1800?). And then there is a big state university in town, so you end up getting delivery trucks to the campus all the time and some drivers don't have the experience to know not to try taking an 18 wheeler down main street.
> Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful.
This is a very important distinction! What a European considers a huge SUV is a small town car in the US. At least judging from what I've seen on my visits.
Combine that with a fairly sophisticated highway system that runs everywhere around the country, a post-war boom in car and suburban home ownership, and low cost of fuel, and it becomes imbued within the culture as the norm.
Depends on the boat. I want to buy a 13ft one-man sailboat that weights 130lbs. Any car can tow that. Some people have boats that weight two tons. Good luck towing that in a Fiat 500.
Well, when you win the lottery and are able to actually buy that boat, perhaps you can budget in the cost of a car to pull it?
This "aspirational" angle to buying big cars actually explains a lot, like a fat kid drinking Gatorade or out of shape guys wearing tracksuits to the mall, "just in case". After all, if you're driving a big car, no-one will be able to definitively say you don't own a boat..
Yup, it's even a common marketing angle. Ever heard of greenwashing? SUV marketing often depicts a vehicle being driven offroad and/or through rough conditions, when 99% of their buyers will never use the car like that. They are playing on buyer's desire to cultivate a certain image.
You might be surprised. 50 years ago it was a major issue, but now engines are powerful and small so all you need is a tow hitch and a small boat. EX: Toyota Corolla can tow 1500 lbs which is a fair sized load.
Granted if, you want to pull a 22' boat that's another story. But, for lake fishing it's fine.
Toyota Corolla can tow 1500 lbs which is a fair sized load.
While the engine can handle it, that's generally not the issue with towing anymore. Like you said, todays engines are powerful. It's the rest of the car that needs to be beefed up for towing. Particularly the transmission and breaks.
My 4-runner had plenty of power to tow my boat, but over time the wear and tear on the rest of the vehicle would destroy a perfectly good car. I now have a Tundra that is build to pull the load. FYI, my boat ready to fish plus trailer is ~7k pounds.
To the original poster wondering why people want such big cars. Personally I would love a smaller car, but I enjoy my boat more :)
First, plenty of boats weight more than 1500lbs, especially if you include the trailer. Trailers always weight more than you think. For example, U-Haul's smallest utility trailer is 630lbs.
Second, there are more issues than power. Towing 1500lbs behind a Corolla puts a lot of strain on the car that it wasn't particularly meant to handle on anything other than an occasional basis, especially with things like automatic transmissions. Also very important, a Corolla is 2700lbs. 1500lbs of trailer starts to get sketchy, and the trailer can start yanking around the tow vehicle.
Edit: yes, you are right, lake fishing in a rowboat, you don't need a dedicated tow vehicle. Thing is, people dream they will get that 22' boat in a few years, so they buy the F-650 or whatever.
U-Haul's designing that to last though a beating and carry cargo for a boat you can go as low as a 125 lbs for the trailer. As a SUT-200-S will handle a 200LB boat and it's shipping wieght is 125 lb. http://www.clcboats.com/shop/products/boat-gear/boat-transpo...
Anyway, sure there are limits, but a nice 14 foot boat at 1,000lb plus 500lb for the trailer is still a decent boat IMO.
I've got a Toyota 4Runner, perfectly capable of moving people and towing a trailer on rare occasions. It also comes in really handy when we do our Costco grocery shopping.
For the "everyday" commute, I'm proudly on the bus and noticing as of late that this is getting more and more common with younger age groups who want to live in urban areas, where mass transit is most convenient. I would bet this trend continues for the next few decades in the United States.
Agreed. I do most of my commuting by bus, and mostly drive my car nights and weekends, when the bus doesn't run as often, or my few trips out of town - most months I only fill up once. That said, I wouldn't get rid of my car: I live in one of about 15 cities in Canada large enough to have a decent bus system [1, >300,000 people], and when I make the 15 hour drive a quarter of the way across the country to visit my family, I need the car to get around, because they live 10 kilometres from the nearest town large enough to have a supermarket. Public transit is awesome, but most of my country simply doesn't have the population density to support it (the distances and travel times are similar in the US, though there are more cities, so I understand the car culture)
I currently drive a Dodge Ram 1500 pickup and love it. Do I have a need for it all the time? No. But there were a few factors that went into the decision:
- My wife wants to get a boat as well as we were gifted jet skis by her family.
- I anticipate moving at least three times over the next 10 years (the lifetime I give to the car barring any accidents) which the pickup will be great to be able to move things as well as being able to hookup a UHaul and go.
The biggest plus for me though is that I'm 6' 3" and 250lb and don't necessarily fit into some of the cars that are economical when it comes to fuel. My previous car (Toyota Corolla) actually would hurt my knees when driving more than 30 minutes because I had to angle my legs in a weird position in order to drive.
"According to Polk's data, the large mainstream sedan segment has plunged from a 5.8-percent share of the US car market in 2008 to just 3.5 percent in 2012. That sales drop is enough to put this most American of car bodystyles behind the minivan segment, a market whose own sales slide has been comparatively well documented."
This is one thing that bugs me about complaints about the carbon emissions of cars. Planes cause far more carbon emissions, and they do it way up in the atmosphere where it seems plausible that it actually does more damage. It's a giant elephant in the room.
You can take steps to reduce carbon emissions in cars (smaller car, drive more efficiently, etc), but you can't with planes other than not flying. Luckily, it's in the best interest of airlines to reduce emissions since that means less jet fuel and more profits.
Indeed, this is true. Thanks for this. The realization that it is also in the best interest of an airline to reduce emissions, especially as the price of oil increases, really helps make me feel better.
Not flying doesn't really reduce emissions though... Those planes are going to fly whether or not you are on it.
> The realization that it is also in the best interest of an airline to reduce emissions, especially as the price of oil increases, really helps make me feel better.
The new Dreamliner jet is a good example of this (once they solve the battery problem and can fly the sucker...). It's massively more efficient than its predecessors (20% more efficient than the 767 according to Boeing). That's a huge jump.
I would just like to add, that the general person uses a car a lot more often than a plane - and it all adds up.
A lot of cars are used by a single person. Almost never (generalised) to it's full potential.
I'm uncertain about this, but I think most planes are very well utilised (closer to the full potential rather than to the opposite) - since it's so uneconomical to go empty or close to empty utilisation.
I'm not however disputing that a plane emits a lot more emissions than road bound vehicles.
"the general person uses a car a lot more often than a plane"
Average CO2 per person in the US is around 17 tonnes per year[1].
A single flight from LA to NYC (round trip) is equivalent to about 2 tonnes after taking into account some high-altitude effect[2].
Driving 12,000 miles per year at 25mpg releases about 4 tonnes[3].
So, if you cut your driving in half and then take one long domestic flight, you are just breaking even. If you take multiple long flights per year, you really have no hope of staying below the average carbon footprint for an american. Unless maybe you live in a tree or something.
I'm not saying this to be critical. I fly, and I am not ashamed of that. But we should be honest with ourselves, and not think that riding a bus once in a while and buying locally-sourced vegetables makes up for taking three international trips a year.
>Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?
Well, yeah. Seriously though, I didn't get the impression that he drives it every day, and the town that he lives in is tiny. I doubt anyone would. I don't know if he mentions it but I'd estimate the bounds for his fuel mileage to be 4 mpg to 10 mpg.
>What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade
If you lived in Missoula Montana, I doubt you'd consider a car / truck as optional.
Dude, it is a single firetruck, not a fleet of firetrucks being driven around to pick up groceries. If he were starting a trend, then yes perhaps this would be a-bad-thing. Instead, it's one guy fulfilling a lifelong dream. The gas mileage is going to be terrible and the emissions bad, but it's one firetruck.
The maxim is simply "if you're really interested in fire trucks, and you can afford one, then you can buy one," and there's no problem with it becoming a "universal law," because very few people will be that interested in fire trucks.
Also, if everyone were to try to buy firetrucks, the price goes up — and makes me wonder how supply and demand fits in with the categorical imperative (if at all).
I sold my car and got the Humvee of bikes, it can carry two loads of firewood, or two kids, or a kid and the plants we got at the garden store. Most of America is batshit crazy but in Portland, Oregon the no-car lifestyle is catching on. Hopefully other cities too.
Awesome bike mate! I'd love one of those but I currently get by with a racer for work and panniered up road bike for shopping but that bike is the bomb! Some couriers use them in London, if I had somewhere to store one I'd buy in a shot! Enjoy!
> Most of America is batshit crazy but in Portland, Oregon...
You're joking right? Portland was nauseating. Filled to the brim with smug hipsters who apparently share your sentiment: that the rest of us are insane for having a car to travel to work/home/vacations etc.
There is a (non-stretched) Fire Engine Limousine in my hometown, I don't know which company it belongs to but I've seen it a few times in central Manchester. Looks like this:
The other side of this is that the energy and pollution cost of creating a new car are very significant. You'd have to extend the life of the gas guzzler for quite a while before there's a net increase in pollution vs. a new vehicle.
I have fkn loved Unimogs for years. To make matters worse, I live near a dealer. Lucky for me I can't afford a new one and even the used ones command a pretty penny.
Depends on how far it is to his work, I mean the thing is a novelty. And reducing carbon emissions isn't the point of it. It's about him following his dream of something he's loved all of his life.
First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks…
Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade, but a 31 year old fire truck is sending a giant fuck you to anyone else trying to reduce their carbon emissions.