Cars

A lot of people find it weird that I am both a car enthusiast and very much anti-car.  How so?

Cars are wonderful machines.  They're frankly amazing when you actually start to look at them.  The internal combustion engine is probably one of the greatest, and certainly most important, inventions in human history.  It's an ingenious way to extract energy...not perfect by any means, incredibly wasteful, but still excellent.  Aerodynamics in cars is very different from aerodynamics in planes, and is equally fascinating.  It's why Formula 1 is so cool - the racing itself can be boring sometimes, the comical veneer of opulence is sometimes off-putting, but the mechanical and engineering details matter even more than any of that.  Cars are wonderful, beautiful, functional machines.

Cars are also the biggest mistake a society ever made.  Forcing people into cars in order to get around has destroyed cities in a comical and totally predictable way, a problem which people are only now starting to rectify.  By designing society around the car, people have ruined their health, their environment, and so much more.  Books and books and books have been written about this.  When we look back at car culture a century from now, from our overly warm planet, we'll wonder just what the hell we were thinking.

It's not hypocritical to think that.  Cars are wonderful, the way we've used them is not.  I'd like to see cars go the way of the sailboat, or of horseback riding - something people do for fun and for sport, not something essential to the basic functions of daily life.  Driving an awesome car fast around a racetrack is way more fun than sitting in traffic on the way to the grocery store anyway.