Tag: Happy Motoring

Jetta TDI Sportswagen

I bought a new car. My Passat sedan is gone, replaced by a Jetta TDI Sportwagen.

I’m not going to go all introspective on you, but I still have a little trouble keeping car buying decisions entirely rational. The rational thing, in terms of pure personal/familial economics, would have been to drive the Passat “into the ground” and then replace it with something even more fuel efficient (the Passat got 18-31 MPG in my experience; the TDI, a diesel, should be good per EPA figures for 30 in the city, 42 on the highway).

But the TDI is simultaneously:

  • Sportier (it has a slightly rakish look and a sunroof that goes on forever)
  • More practical (station wagon in slight disguise; my older brother said of his that he feels like a teenage boy with his first pickup truck: “Can I take a bunch of stuff to Goodwill?”
  • Obviously, much more fuel efficient.

I’m aware, however, that it’s still a part of the great, ultimately-unsustainable, Happy Motoring Great American Auto Scam. It even comes with a tax rebate for energy efficiency.

Sigh.

Well, gotta go now. The road beckons.

America at 2050 – and 400 millionsub

Another voice of economic optimism for the U.S. to counter my pessimism, Joel Kotkin thinks the next hundred million Americans, mostly immigrants, will be our economic salvation. But he thinks these folks – who won’t necessarily be very upwardly-mobile – will live in the suburbs, “the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community.”

Huh!? I’ll grant the the faux estate in the auto-dependent suburbs has become the American dream since World War II, but is it really a community-promoter? And how will they afford the $10/gallon gas to get to their jobs?

The rosy picture doesn’t work for me at that level if nothing else.