Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Maybe its the Road Rage Talking...

I was behind this car on the commute to work this morning. Sure, it is expensive ($440k?) and fast (205mph?) but only one thought went through my head:
"Why in the World would you have this car in Hawai'i?"
Con#1) The roads are crap. Literally sometimes: My town is a cow rancher town, and the island has a large amount of gravel, dirt, and lava roads, along with roads into steep valleys. Most people have 4-wheel drives. There is a ton of traffic and the large construction trucks cause damage on the paved roads, which leads me to:
Con#2) The crap roads are under construction. I appreciate the use of my tax dollars, and the fine labor of our State contractors. But there is construction all the time. This means that one is sitting in one's stopped overheating car, awaiting the other lane. Recently I have been sitting still for around 45 minutes. For me this means knitting in place. For the Porsche owner, it means he is nowhere near his possible 205 mph, which brings me to:
Con#3) Nowhere on the island can you go faster than 55mph, with most roads being 35mph or slower. This is true legally (I should know, I have two speeding tickets to prove it!) and literally: Due to the above reasons, plus traffic, you just really can't go fast!
Con#4) No one but tourists drive convertibles. It just rains too suddenly and furiously to bother with a lid. I get giggles driving out of the rain, and seeing happy sunburnt tourists in their Mustang convertibles about to drive into a huge rainstorm...Blissfully unaware. And yes, I know they have fast lid devices and such. Still a pain in the ass! And these people have heard of skin cancer, right?
Con#5) All the above mentioned, under-construction, slow, congested paved roads are only one or two lanes. Passing is possible in designated areas, where a fast sportscar would still be within the flow of traffic attempting to pass a huge truck full of lava rock or papayas or macnuts or...Whatever.
Final Con) Even if you had an open, empty, paved, fast, unrainy, unpatrolled stretch of open road...Where are you gonna go? We are on an island!

I must conclude that the owner wanted to show off his possibilities: He spent $440K to drive 35 mph on crappy roads, in order to show the rest of us that if conditions were right, he has enough money to buy a machine that could possibly go 205 mph and leave us in the copious dust.

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