Cavemen, Laundry & Electric Cars

Imagine you are a caveman.  You hunt for your family as a living.  After a good day of hunting, you drag your catch home and make a fire.  You have mastered the art of preparing a meal – from the specific trees you cut down for the wood to use as fuel;  to your lucky stone which you use to light the spark and the special mix of herbs and spices your better half collected during the day.  You are an enthusiast of your art.  You have even started writing stories about your art on cave walls…

Fast forward to the 18th century and the advent of the stove.  Your art is disappearing, your role in the family is changing.

Today you still go out to earn for your family, albeit in an entirely different way.  To feed the family is mostly a quick task of cooking something on the stove, popping a ready-made meal in the microwave or grabbing burgers from the drive-through.  Sometimes, over weekends, you still light a fire and use that fire for a barbeque.  But it is no longer just about feeding the family.  It is about reconnecting with that caveman or some form of socialization…

The same type of change has happened to laundry.  Where it once was all hand-washed, it is now mostly done by a machine.  Instead of getting a workout doing the laundry, housewives can now go out for a yoga session while the washing machine does its thing.  But occasionally, some clothing items still need to be washed by hand as they are too fragile for the machine or, in my case, were too deeply stained in some accident involving something that fell off the pizza that was just delivered to my front door.

There are many such examples where technology has eliminated the mundane, but the old-fashioned item is still used from time to time.  Riding a horse, posting a letter, lighting a candle and going to the library – those are all very special things today.

As a car enthusiast, I read quite a lot about what other people, also enthusiasts, write about cars.  There is a general lack of enthusiasm for “green” cars.  The Toyota Prius hybrid gets ridiculed as the dullest of appliances and  the Nissan Leaf electric car also does not excite.  As governments crack down on air pollution, the Jeremy Clarksons of this world worry that cars running internal combustion engines may be outlawed soon.

Enter the Tesla Model S.  The electric car has evolved into something that even those in the know praise.  It even won quite a few awards from the motoring press.

My prediction is that fossil-fuelled cars will become something very rare and special very soon.  All of us will use zero-emission electric cars for our daily commutes.  I first thought we will just keep the gasmobiles for long road trips.  But Tesla’s expanding network of Supercharger stations, that aim to recharge the battery of an electric car in no time, may even put an end to that.

Perhaps they will become the future prized possessions of only a luck few.  Those with the financial means to own the space to store an extra vehicle and to pay the astronomic prices for heavily-taxed fuel will be the only ones to be labelled petrolheads.