Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hybrid
Going green brings out the best, worst of us
The Observer began his week last Monday morning with the news that oil had hit $120 a barrel. While others were beating their breasts and rending their tunics, I danced the two-step with myself in the morning light. Then I read that the price of gas hit a new high for the sixteenth straight day and shuddered with glee.
Why? I had bought a hybrid the week before, that's why. Green extremists can hector me no more. I'm a tad late to the hybrid game - fashionably so as I see it - but at least I'm headed in the right direction. As the guy once said, if you're on the wrong train, every stop is the wrong stop.
As I review my calendar, I see I picked up my car on Earth Day. Color me British racing green. Just kidding. Earth Day was the furthest thing from my mind when I got it. There was nothing noble about my acquisition. I was not making a statement. I was just trying to save a buck.
Ditto for my old friend Tim, another triceratops from Jurassic Park, who bought a hybrid in LA a couple of weeks earlier for the same reason. This bicoastal activity heralds a tectonic shift in our automotive culture.
We are, however improbable, textbook cases of what's supposed to happen. I watch gas streak past $3.60 a gallon at Hess and start scheming. Tim looks at a gallon of gas in LA for, like, $213 and bolts.
He unloads a Touareg, the
It's the premium gas that is embarrassing. It's like wearing white socks with a blue suit. I say embarrassing rather than costly because the whole premium gas thing is bogus. The difference between premium and regular is around 30 cents a gallon. You use a tank a week and the annual difference for most cars is somewhere under $200. That buys you a couple of so-so Sox tickets.
No, mileage is where you save dough. So the first thing people asked about the hybrid is: what kind of mileage am I getting? I have no idea, I reply. They're stunned. There's a button to push that will tell you what my average mileage is, they tell me. I haven't a clue where it is, I tell them.
I say, look, I've got a hybrid. I'm doing the right thing. The salesman hands me the keys and I drive off. End of story. It's conceivable I might check the miles per gallon at some point, but then it's also conceivable I might jump off the Mystic River bridge attached to a bungee cord.
Tim takes the same approach. "I took delivery of my hybrid on April 3 and have yet to visit the gas station at the bottom of the hill where I formerly had a reserved spot," he informed me Monday. Period. He bought a Mercury hybrid. I thought about a Prius. Excellent vehicle, but it looks like a clown car, so I went with the
What we're doing is trading down, which is all the rage. In the old days, you traded up for the car of your dreams. Now you take the elevator down to the vehicle that least damages your wallet.
I asked my friend Bo, who traded oil in Houston with the best of them for more than two decades, what's up with prices? "The bottom line is there are no sellers," he says. "Who wants to go short in this market?"
We working stiffs are not the only ones trimming our sails, by the way. Bo reports anecdotally that a few of the really rich people down his way are beginning to cut back on their fun flights in their fun jets.
One wondered whether he really needed to drop $30,000 to fly to Carmel for the weekend. Another scratched a private plane flight somewhere for a first-class ticket on commercial and took his family to Paris for a week from the savings. (Me, I wonder whether I really need to make that drive to West Newton.)
Once I decide to buy a car, I apply a groundbreaking approach to the task. I buy it. Back in the day, I would engage in a ludicrous, losing strategy to overwhelm salesmen. The house always wins, yet I would seethe at 4 a.m. over the $100 I could have taken off the guy in the short-sleeved shirt had I thrown more testosterone at him. Silly me.
Today, I blithely accept the fact I'm getting taken. Everyone gets taken. That's the auto biz. I make some noise to get taken slightly less and then buy. I have better things to agonize over.
I now drive around town looking for stoplights to experience the silence that kicks in as the car engine shuts down. Truth be told, I'm getting a bit arrogant. I look at the proles in regular cars around me and wonder, don't they know the Observer has gone hybrid? Don't they know they should too, pronto?
Shoot me if I continue this behavior. It marks the early stage of the virus that will explode into full Green mania if left untreated. That's the one that makes you run screaming out of the room to avoid hideous carbon footprint talk.
So where does it all end? It won't be long before a gallon of gas and a box of Cheerios are both in double digits. Food prices are bloodcurdling, and I fear for my Skippy Super Chunk. But you can only have one psychotic episode at a time. For now, it's gas. Not to worry. The Observer has gone hybrid.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com
