An exception to this criticism may be Harley Davidson motorcycles. If you compare one to the currently more-popular “racing bikes” full of carbon fiber and titanium and *MUCH* faster, Harleys make a HUGE amount of neighborhood shaking NOISE! Why? Because their mufflers are designed to not work well, period. Consider a car. A car has a MUCH bigger engine than any motorcycle, especially an SUV (!). How much noise does a Hummer with an engine 10X bigger than a Harley make? Almost none. The only truly loud car I’ve ever heard was a restored Ferrari Testarossa. A neighbor got it for $35K back in the 80s. It literally sounded like a rocket. He worked in construction and just loved cars.
Another thing though if you just look around, is how utterly UNINSPIRED most cars on the road are, meaning, to me, first that most people are “sold” by car salesmen whatever they want to sell most, but also that most people (85%?) really do just see a car as a means of transport instead of an extension of their personality, for who wants to scream out to the world “I’m boring!”?
For the record I have owned:
A Fiat X1/9 (poor man’s Italian sports car with go-cart-like tight steering, a removable roof that stored in the front trunk and a small panel between the two seats that allowed one to manually advance the timing by turning the half-tightened distributor cap!)
A Toyota Camry (when my mom died I got her car). Boring, but reliable.
A Toyota Landcruiser with a tank-sized inline six cylinder engine, which I restored after removing 150 pounds of late 1970s “pollution control” canister thingies from.
A Honda Helix (still made in one form or another), highway legal (75MPG easily) SCOOTER, that was so quiet while idling that I could park it at bike racks in college.
I now own a high tech lithium battery powered “Razor style” scooter, made by Roth Motors, for use in NYC. Slightly dangerous though since you can’t see potholes at night. I didn’t get a gas one since they make noise and are not legal here. I also figured out how to use a certain power tool battery pack to modify it to go twice as far.
In other words, there are *so* many choices in vehicles! The confusion I have about pickup trucks vs. SUVs though is that I’ve never seen a “big fancy” pickup truck with anything in the back, save maybe a dog.
Oh, I forgot about my DiBlasi *folding* motorcycle (not highway legal but fully legal within NYC and merely technically illegal across the footpaths of bridges). What I realized though, was that a good titanium bicycle was better, so now I use that when it’s too wet or dark for the stand-up scooter.
So I’ve had a wide experience with vehicles. But a car with batteries in it? Ugh. Twice as many systems to go wrong, and will those batteries last 100K miles? And WHERE do I plug it in when I park at a meter? I guess I’ll carry extra cans of gas in the tiny trunk, or strap them to the back, like I did with the Landcruiser!
I mean how efficient can it be to use a GASOLINE motor to run a on-board GENERATOR to charge BATTERIES to run extra electric MOTORS? And how well do BATTERIES work in the winter? How well will this “more efficient” quality hold up after 50K miles?
My guess is that only when FUEL CELLS that run on gasoline are perfected will electric cars ever catch on, since then you’ll have only ONE system involved, all electric.
