Back in the 1970s, and earlier, American cars had the - not undeserved - reputation of being huge, vast, yes, let's face it, massive blocks of steel which trundled along the Freeways guzzling gas as the great American dream was utterly and totally fulfilled for several generations.
If you still watch any of those old TV popular shows from the 1970s, you'll still be able to see them turning corners in precisely the same way supertankers don't and looking about as aerodynamic as bricks during the car chases, and bouncing over the rocks and gravel in a most undignified manner with all of that right angled bodywork with their endless hoods and trunks and muddy colours.
Still, times changed, and with the "Gas Crisis" of the mid-to-late 1970s, suddenly those nippy little "Compact" cars that had been the source of such derision suddenly started to look like a more sensible option, and were embraced so much by the American driver that, when you drive around nowadays, the roads generally look very different.
In other words they look much the same in terms of what's driven upon them as any other major city in the world, and the "Big American Car" is seldom seen. That said, I did spot an old Cadillac station wagon parked at the side of a road in Santa Cruz and it certainly gave the impression of being nearly half a block long, which was always kind of the point with those cars, given that they were built in a huge country which had wide open Freeways to get the people around.
To the British mind, however, the so-called "Gas Crisis" was always a bit of a myth, given that, even twenty years ago, about twenty years on from the "Crisis", you could fill up your car for about ten dollars when you were paying three or four times that price back home.
Still, I suppose that if you're used to petrol being dirt cheap, hiking up the prices to merely cheap might still come as a bit of a shock. Interestingly, the price of petrol is still a bit of a hot topic in conversations you have with Americans when travelling around.
When we were (eventually) signing our Car Rental agreement, we decided to go with the "buy a full tank, return it empty" option because they were offering a "reasonable rate" of $3.80 a gallon when we might pay $4.30 or more at a Gas Station. When you tell them that you're paying about $2.00 a litre back home, or about $8.00 to $9.00 a gallon, they look amazed and genuinely wonder if anyone bothers actually driving any more.
Which brings me around to the great big trucks, because nowadays you see them absolutely everywhere, dominating the car parks of the motels and malls, and dwarfing many of the more ordinary cars on the Highways and Freeways.
You'll have seen them on the streets of the UK, too... usually driven by tiny young mothers doing the school run and, whilst they look ridiculous over here, they kind of fit into the American landscape rather well, certainly as the vehicle of choice for the working man, or anyone who has to travel any distance, even though the lights are far too high off the ground so that they blind you if they happen to pull up behind you in evening traffic.
Now, because I live somewhere that suffers from the cold in winter, I drive a rather small, four-wheel drive vehicle called a "Rav-4" at home, and you do see those from time-to-time in American traffic and they look tiny in comparison to these massive, massive trucks, and yet I know just how expensive it is to run my tiny little Rav, just as I know how many pounds it takes to fill up one of those bigger trucks, given that I had a colleague who once had one and who turned an alarming shade of puce the first time he went to the petrol station.
Politically, of course, the price of gas is a hot topic in the US, and is possibly the thing most likely to topple Presidents, given that it effects everybody all of the time, and when you're stretching a budget, even the ridiculously low prices they pay might seem huge if they double in a very short time.
Still, times changed, and with the "Gas Crisis" of the mid-to-late 1970s, suddenly those nippy little "Compact" cars that had been the source of such derision suddenly started to look like a more sensible option, and were embraced so much by the American driver that, when you drive around nowadays, the roads generally look very different.
In other words they look much the same in terms of what's driven upon them as any other major city in the world, and the "Big American Car" is seldom seen. That said, I did spot an old Cadillac station wagon parked at the side of a road in Santa Cruz and it certainly gave the impression of being nearly half a block long, which was always kind of the point with those cars, given that they were built in a huge country which had wide open Freeways to get the people around.
To the British mind, however, the so-called "Gas Crisis" was always a bit of a myth, given that, even twenty years ago, about twenty years on from the "Crisis", you could fill up your car for about ten dollars when you were paying three or four times that price back home.
Still, I suppose that if you're used to petrol being dirt cheap, hiking up the prices to merely cheap might still come as a bit of a shock. Interestingly, the price of petrol is still a bit of a hot topic in conversations you have with Americans when travelling around.
When we were (eventually) signing our Car Rental agreement, we decided to go with the "buy a full tank, return it empty" option because they were offering a "reasonable rate" of $3.80 a gallon when we might pay $4.30 or more at a Gas Station. When you tell them that you're paying about $2.00 a litre back home, or about $8.00 to $9.00 a gallon, they look amazed and genuinely wonder if anyone bothers actually driving any more.
Which brings me around to the great big trucks, because nowadays you see them absolutely everywhere, dominating the car parks of the motels and malls, and dwarfing many of the more ordinary cars on the Highways and Freeways.
You'll have seen them on the streets of the UK, too... usually driven by tiny young mothers doing the school run and, whilst they look ridiculous over here, they kind of fit into the American landscape rather well, certainly as the vehicle of choice for the working man, or anyone who has to travel any distance, even though the lights are far too high off the ground so that they blind you if they happen to pull up behind you in evening traffic.
Now, because I live somewhere that suffers from the cold in winter, I drive a rather small, four-wheel drive vehicle called a "Rav-4" at home, and you do see those from time-to-time in American traffic and they look tiny in comparison to these massive, massive trucks, and yet I know just how expensive it is to run my tiny little Rav, just as I know how many pounds it takes to fill up one of those bigger trucks, given that I had a colleague who once had one and who turned an alarming shade of puce the first time he went to the petrol station.
Politically, of course, the price of gas is a hot topic in the US, and is possibly the thing most likely to topple Presidents, given that it effects everybody all of the time, and when you're stretching a budget, even the ridiculously low prices they pay might seem huge if they double in a very short time.
But they'll all still continue to buy those massive, massive trucks… perhaps because it feels like a symbol of their masculinity, or a status symbol, or perhaps just because the national understanding is still the belief that Americans should be driving great big vehicles, even if they must then complain endlessly about the cost of the fuel that you need to put in them…
Odd country...
Don't get me started on US and their gas guzzling habits. Oil isn't their God given right, yet hundreds of thousands of people have died so that they can drive around in the big fuck off trucks for the price of a couple of burgers. See you got me started,
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