Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Toyota Prius...Darwin's answer to effeminate girly-men.

I'm getting sick of hearing about the Prius drivers who can't figure out how to stop their cars when those cars allegedly suddenly speed up for no reason. It may be happening due to a defect, it may not. But whether it does or doesn't, seriously--how stupid do you have to be to not think to just shift the car into neutral or turn the damned thing off?

It's really not that hard. Just move the gear selector or turn the key. Problem solved.

I suspect that most people who have this run-away car thing happen to them do just that and we don't see them in the news for days. But let it happen to just one functional retard, drama queen or lawsuit-seeking opportunist and press conferences are called and the alleged "victim" cries and tells the world how scared and powerless he/she felt.

These people need to just take a deep breath and have a nice glass of "shut the fuck up."
 I don't need to read or hear about people who can't solve simple problems. I'm betting these fools regularly lock their keys in their convertibles and then get upset when it rains and they can't get in to put the top up. These are the kind of people who spend hours stuck on stalled escalators.

I remember when something bad like this happened to me when I was driving many years ago. Only I wasn't driving a sissy-faggy Prius. I was driving a six-ton M35a2 ex-military truck that I was looking to buy back when I used to buy such things, and as my luck would have it, the air-pak blew out on this one just as I was starting to descend a long grade with a lot of curves in the mountains of North Carolina. Instantly I lost the brakes and the truck began picking up speed. I tried to downshift but I missed the gear and wound up stuck in neutral, unable to get the transmission into any gear at all. And the big truck kept picking up speed.Now these old trucks weren't like the little metrosexual Prius. No airbags, no crumple zones, no purple teletubbie keyrings included with every car purchased new... No, these primitive monsters didn't even have seat belts. And to make it more interesting, this one has a canvas cab top supported by a couple of thin aluminum tubes that would offer no protection at all if and when this truck flipped over. And it didn't take a physics major to figure out that this truck eventually would flip over as soon as the speed got to the point where it couldn't negotiate one of the curves and left the roadway. In short, I knew that there was an excellent chance that this truck was going to kill me within the next minute or two unless I kept it under control; if it got away from me for a even a few seconds, I was probably going to die.

So down the hill I raced, going faster and faster, trying to keep the truck on the road. I'd given up on even trying to stay in my lane—I was just trying to keep it in between the ditches and I was using the whole road, praying that I could dodge any oncoming traffic. Meanwhile, my then-girlfriend was following behind in my Ford Ranger, screaming at me over the hand-held CB radio to slow down. I managed to tell her that I had a problem with the truck, and then I lost the radio onto the floorboards while wrestling with the steering wheel and that was that.

The truck kept picking up speed. 40Mph, 45 mph, 50mph, 55mph, 60mph..I'm betting this truck had never gone this fast since leaving the factory back in the 1960's. And for a while I was actually managing quite well and riding the curves out as we barreled down the mountain. I even managed to avoid a car or two that was coming up the road, and I was starting to think that I might get through this yet when suddenly I saw the mail lady up ahead.

This area had rural mail delivery, and each little hollow or side road had a row of mailboxes at the end of it with a mailbox for each resident. A mail lady in her station wagon was filling these mailboxes and when I first saw her, she was backing out of one of these little side roads on the right onto the main road—the main road that I was barreling down in an out-of-control twenty-three thousand pound truck that was probably doing well better than 70mph (an estimate, as the speedometer only went up to 60)...instinctively I went for the horn to warn her, but when I hit it and nothing happened, I realized that without the air pak, I had no air horn either. Damn.

Had I thought about it, I'm sure that I'd have given anything to be sitting in a little plastic Prius at that time. But that wasn't an option so I wrenched the wheel sharply to the left to miss her and then back to the right again, hoping that this wasn't going to be the maneuver that flipped me. I managed to swerve around her car, missing it by scant feet—and the girlfriend swears that the truck tipped onto the five wheels on the driver's side only—but I wasn't able to avoid the mailboxes on the left shoulder. The two- to three-dozen mailboxes for everyone living on that side road were in exactly the wrong place that day. I nailed that rack of mailboxes dead on and wiped out every damned one of them, sending wood and metal splinters and plenty of mail flying every which way.

But God was watching over me that day, and the road leveled out shortly. The truck finally slowed down and coasted to a stop, and by the time that I got it onto the shoulder and shut it down, the girlfriend was pulling up and screeching like a lunatic about what I'd just done.

But I didn't call a press conference, hire a lawyer and a PR firm and start planning to sue everyone like these milquetoast Prius drivers are doing. No, I just remembered that we were in the South and had just caused what the locals called “a heap o' trouble.” We jumped back into my Ranger, drove back to the garage where the truck's seller was waiting, and tossed him the keys on the fly. Then we focused on getting out of there before the troopers showed up and when it became clear that we'd pulled that trick off, we found the next bar and did some serious drinking.

No mental trauma, no claims for damage, no public expression of outrage or tears before the media's cameras...it was just another day and life went on. But then real men know how to handle crisis and adversity. And no real man would ever—ever--drive a Prius, so I guess that explains all of these whiny Prius stories and all of the sobbing or wildly-gesticulating effeminate males on the news describing their horrible ordeals.

Death by Prius...please. The rest of us would be so sorry to see you girly-men taken out of the gene pool. That would just break the heart of every real man in America. Grow a pair and get over it already.

Oh--and I can't help but notice that every Prius seems to come from the factory with an "Obama" sticker on it's back end someplace. That alone says mouthfuls about the type of dependent lemming who finds such cars attractive.

Give me a 1960's Mustang or a vintage GTO any day...or even another M35a2. If I have to go out behind the wheel, I'm at least going out in a man's ride.

8 comments:

  1. Reminds me of the excursion I took 20+ years ago, while in the employ of Uncle Sam. I'm driving solo in a Government motor pool car (I think it was a Chevy) with special Department of Defense tags on it. The accelerator had a hair trigger, and a few times I had to tap it sideways to get unstuck.

    On one of the windiest days of the year, I was drivin west on Route 70 past Hancock, headed to Cumberland. I drove up THAT big hill, and,just before they cut through the rock, a gust of wind picked the car off the pavement for a period that could not have been more than one or two seconds in real time, but which seemed like hours to me. It was a nasty bump!

    Then, at the crest of the hill, I saw the "Runaway Truck Ramp" sign. THAT was really scary, and then I realized that the downward descent was really, really steep.

    So I took my foot off the accelerator and downshifted, and caught my breath with the descent.

    Not too long thereafter, I came to a little hamlet called "Flintstone," so, to break the tension once and for all, I screamed "Yabba-Dabba-Doo!!!"

    The remainder of the trek to Cumberland was uneventful. All of the wimps were off the road that day on account of the windy conditions.

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  2. Anonymous7:09 AM

    well one of the problems with the prius (and many other modern cars, not just toyotas) is the transmission is computer controlled too. So if it thinks you shouldn't be shifting into neutral-you can't. nor can you turn it off if the car thinks you shouldn't.

    nice thing about the new VW GTI my fiancee drives is while they are computer controlled just like the others-if the brake is applied same time the the engine. accelerator is pushed-the brake signal has priority and stops the car.

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  3. Just think what would have happened if you would have hit that row of mailboxes in the Prius! It wouldn't have been wood and steel flying every which-way, it would have been the Prius!

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  4. Sir, no offense, but in this day, the mustang or gto is no man's ride. Real men drive 3/4 ton pickup trucks with an American made diesel engine under the hood, preferrably a Duramax, hooked up to a good performance chip. With that set up you get the best of all three worlds.

    Speed-more than enough to beat a small block v8 in a drag. I've seen z06's lose to a tricked out duramax.

    Power-able to haul what doesn't smash the truck

    Mileage- 20-24 mpg highway seems to be average.

    And to top it off, diesel burns cleaner and the engines, as well as parts, last near forever.

    Please don't get me started on the pussies with there tiny ass gassers that don't get significantly better mileage than mid sized diesels. And that run on ethanol.

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  5. Today's Mustang and GTO are pretty punk, but the ones made back in the late 60's and early 70's will never lose their cool factor.

    That said, Diesel trucks are the way to go, but I'll go for the Cummins turbo in the Dodge trucks first.

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  6. Nothing wrong with the Cummins, just the crap box it comes wrapped in. Call me biased :)

    True story though, before my Duramax, I had a 12 valve '97 dodge ram with an edge tuner on it that got 28 mpg highway.

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  7. No argument there. Pity Dodge is offering an engine good for 300,000 miles in a truck that's good for about 10,000.

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  8. 300,000 miles is what I expect out of gassers. That was when I sold my last two petrol powered half ton pickups. One ( a 1994 chevy 1500) is now driven by my electrician; it has 312,000 now. And the other, ( a 2000 chevy 1500) is driven by the local city inspector; it has 305,000 now.


    My 2002 Duramax is at 293,000 and if what they say about the Cummins' longevity is true, 400,000+ might be more appropriate. One local rancher who hauls horses and cows 5 days a week says his has over a million on it. I don't know if I believe that but he has gone through 6 transmissions

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