The Bad, the Sad, and the Ugly

The Bad

The Shell Eco-Marathon is a thing that happens every year when a bunch of people get together and run their homemade cars for six miles around a track to see who can get the best gas mileage.  Every year, they are hailed as the future of cars, groundbreaking technology that will revolutionize how passenger vehicles are made.  Everyone seems to think that these cars are built with sparkly new features that will translate to useful developments for everyone else and allow us to save the environment at the same time.  My problem with this event (and the many others like it) is that all these cars are useless.

Here’s an example.

That’s not a car, it’s a fish tank with wheels.  It’s made of plastic, barely has room for a driver, doesn’t have room for anything else, and it’ll break if it runs into a speed bump.

These cars are efficient because they’re very small, very light, and very slow, and they will contribute absolutely nothing to the progress of automotive technology.

The Sad

This is exactly what it looks like.

It’s really a very short story.  A crazy Nigerian man smashed through the fence at the Calabar International Airport and, apparently trying to do some actual damage, wedged his car under this plane, saying that Jesus made him do it.

I’m guessing that everyone panicked for about 30 seconds until nothing happened.  There were no explosives in the car, the cops arrested him, the plane is fine, the car is fine, and no flights were delayed or diverted at all.  This is truly the most pathetic terror attempt ever, including the Times Square guy.  At least he actually put explosives in the damn car, even if he was too stupid to make gasoline explode.

Step one: put fire in it.  There is no step two.

The Ugly

This is an Audi R8.

SO pretty.

It is a beautiful machine.  It is a marvel of engineering, it is expensive, it is fast, it is luxurious, and pretty much everyone wants one, even if they don’t know it yet.

This is an Infiniti G35.

The opposite of the last caption.

Not a single one of those adjectives applies to this car, except possibly “expensive” because this car goes for $36,000.  For that price used, you could get a Mercedes S-, C-, or E-Class, a Mustang Shelby GT500, a Porsche Cayman, 911 Carrera Cabriolet, or 1981 911 SC (megaclassic), or a fucking Maserati Cambiocorsa coupe.  I would prefer every single one of those cars, among many others, to an Infiniti.

The point of this is that anyone who recognizes the black stripes as attempting to replicate an R8 is someone who knows what an R8 looks like, and will think you’re a jackass.  Everyone else thinks it’s just a shitty paint job.

Nice work.