“Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.”
P.J. O’Rourke
The Cadillac Coupe De Ville?
Exqueeze me?
Leaving aside for a moment the smug self-frottage which makes up the rest of this quote, if you’re going to hold a single car up as the pinnacle of human achievement it’s absolutely certain that the Cadillac ‘Coupe De Ville’ would be among very last you would chose. There were five generations of Coupe De Ville between 1949 and 1993, it would help if PJ would tell us to which he is referring. ‘Coupe’ is a body style, ‘De Ville’ is a trim level which sits between ‘Calais’ and ‘Fleetwood’. I point this out merely to demonstrate that the man knows nothing about which he speaks, but it doesn’t matter too much. The fact is the Cadillac Coupe De Ville represents everything that is wrong about the age of car worship we find ourselves born in to. When our grandchildren ask us where all the oil went we can point to Cadillac’s 7.7 litre v8 and sub 10 mpg fuel consumption figures, a profligate consumer of materials and energy from assembly to scrap yard.
What a total idiot.
If he’d said Lamborghini Gallardo he might have had a point….
