Grubby Americans Invent Totally Original Car
By John R.
Car Crash Accident on Street by Industrial Photograph
Created in Canva
Disclaimer: Views and humor expressed in this article are the opinion of the author, and do not necessarily represent the NorthStar Navigator as a whole.
America has a strange obsession with cars. Nearly everyone has a car, or three. Public transportation almost doesn’t exist in many parts of the US, and only big cities have subways. In America, you will find cars that will seem big compared to the rest of the world because they are! This is partly because America is a massive country that spans a continent, unlike England where you can drive up and down the whole thing in just under 15 hours. To some Europeans, this is a nightmarish drive, but to Americans it's a Sunday excursion. Americans may not invent ideas, but they certainly make them bigger and better; this is no exception with cars, road trips, and fast food.
While cars on both continents are very complex, they both have areas where one shines over the other. Americans tend to see cars as an extension of themselves and their personality. A car full of half-eaten oatmeal bowls and a ramshackle back seat will tell you a lot about a person. By contrast, European cars tend to be focused more on fuel efficiency and practicality. This is also one reason why European cars are much smaller than American cars; Europe itself is a lot smaller, and its infrastructure was designed around small horse-drawn wagons and other medieval ways of travel. Thus, the streets are much smaller and narrower compared to American streets which are comparatively quite new and have largely been designed from the onset to accommodate large numbers of traffic, not to mention there is a lot more real estate here.
Let's move onto another hot topic: gas. No matter your opinion on whose fault it is, personally, I blame the penguins(think about it); the fact is gas prices are outrageous. While Americans are wondering if they should take out a mortgage on their house to pay for gas, Europeans have been facing high gas prices for a long time. Gas and diesel fuel is a bit pricey there, and so cars kind of have to have good gas mileage, another reason why their cars tend to be smaller.
Everyone knows America invented the car and rules of the road first. Europe simply adopted a totally unoriginal and twisted form of driving. This is true according to those who know very little history. Those who know a bit more history know that neither side invented the first car. But those who know even more know that America was, in fact, not the first to invent the car. Europe had been using steam buggies long before the idea took hold across the pond. But, in 1896 Henry Ford, being a typical American, took the idea and made it bigger and better. He switched the steam engine out with his newly invented gas engine, then took it for spin down the streets of Detroit leaving traumatized horses and confused cops in his wake. To this day, no one knows whether the horses appreciated the invention of the car. That fateful day, horses suddenly took a back seat and the job of policing suddenly became much more complicated. But your life is much better for it, arguably. And here ends our excursion into the automotive world. And because I lack the emotional capacity to say goodbye, I’ll just say this: Drive safe, and watch out for jaywalkers. They are everywhere these days.
Columns: 🔎Informational
John R is a two-year veteran of NSA and of the NorthStar Navigator. He currently lives on the West Coast of the United States. He is deeply interested in topics concerning international relations, geo-politics, military history, equipment, and tactics, law, and criminal justice. He plans on attending college and getting a degree needed to becoming a police officer. He loves the woods and the sea, and his favorite types of day are cloudy, windy, wet.